I have a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, which has "internet keys". They are Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh, Search, Favorites, and Web/Home. The all correspond nicely to commands in Mozilla. When using XFree86 4, these keys generate keysyms XF86Back, XF86Forward, XF86Stop, XF86Refresh, XF86Search, XF86Favorites, and XF86HomePage. I imagine it would be a simple task to capture these keysyms.

Erm Mozilla doesn't have a refresh or favourites function :) (please don't dignify that with an answer because I do know what the equiv functions are - I'm just in one of those weird moods!) Seriously I didn't know that XF86 v4 supported this but saying that you say it does then I think it should be supported, although you could say first things first they don't even work on Windows yet :) See my Windows bug 64371 I'll confirm this and leave it separate to the Windows bug as it probably requires different work to be performed. I'm marking as an enhancement as this isn't really a bug it's a feature request.

a cool idea. CC'ing blizzard for help on capturing platform-specific keys. we could translate these into mozilla-specific "VK_BROWSER_BACK" and so forth so that other platforms might eventually benefit.

*** Bug 87238 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

nav triage team: Would be a very cool feature, but not a mozilla1.0 stopper. Marking mozilla1.1

over to new keyboard owner

This is mine. I could use some help, though, in finding out what gtk sends for those keys (not having one of these keyboards).

Just made a small gtk test program, and the results match the #defines in XFree86keysym.h (not very surprising...) :) There are more defined there than what's on my keyboard, so you could be ahead of your time and implement all that fits... It seems a bit stupid to paste the whole file here, so here is a link to the cvs repository: http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/xc/include/XF86keysym.h It seems there are no corresponding defines in gdk, perhaps a feature request could be made there.

Thanks for the list! I'll look into it. I'll also see if I can get my hands on one of these keyboards, to test on. First, though, we need a decision about what to do about missing keys and whether the DOM event model will ever give us symbols for them (either bug 62067 or bug 13168, whichever is solved first).

Bumping out until we get a decision about what to do about bug 13168.

*** Bug 84868 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Is this still broken on current builds?

*** Bug 307034 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This has now been requested for years. Is it so difficult to implement or why isn´t this done? It would be a great usability enhancement for many users!

*** Bug 344089 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I've seen that the current workaround suggested by ThinkWiki is to assign the symbols "F19" and "F20" for XF86Back/Forward. This seems incredibly weird. Is it hardcoded somewhere to only accept function keys' keysyms?

What a pity this still doesn't work. Such a basic feature, so little work ...

There is a page on thinkwiki related to this problem : http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Talk:How_to_get_special_keys_to_work#XF86Back_in_Firefox You don't need to map your special keys to F19/F20. For example, you can add the following in chrome/browser.jar/content/browser/browser.xul under section <keyset id="mainKeyset"> : <key id="goBackKb" keycode="XF86Back" command="Browser:Back"/> <key id="goForwardKb" keycode="XF86Forward" command="Browser:Forward"/> It works for me and the old shortcuts are still there (backspace, ctrl-left). Could firefox handle those shortcuts ? A user shouldn't have to mess with xul files.

I spoke too soon. Actually that hack leads to an erratic behaviour of XF86Back and XF86Forward keys (XF86Back still changes the page even when there is no previous page, XF86Forward does change the page but not always for the next page and ALT-GR also changes the page ??). Under Firefox for Windows, those keys work. Maybe we'll see this bug closed before Firefox 6.0...

According to http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work "XF86Forward and XF86Back do not work correctly in Firefox. You may want to map them to F19 and F20 instead if you use Firefox." I also added <key id="goBackKb" keycode="XF86Back" command="Browser:Back"/> <key id="goForwardKb" keycode="XF86Forward" command="Browser:Forward"/> And at Firefox was also behaving rather strange.

Ani, the problem is that other brothers such as Epiphany or Konqueror manage to handle XF86Forward and XF86Back well. I don't want to unmap those keysyms to make Firefox behaves properly (I don't think it is possible to map one key to several keysyms with Xmodmap).

This should work. The conspicuous lack of keyboards with internet keys around me (EVERYONE has a Macbook.... including me) has caused problems with testing but after Googling code I think the keybindings are right. I know the events are sent properly because I changed the switch statement to keys that I do have. This is the exact same thing we do on Windows.

+ nsCOMPtr<nsIAtom> command; This could be just nsIAtom*. Instead of structuring your code this way, you could create a helper method DispatchCommandEvent so each switch case would just be e.g. "return DispatchCommandEvent(nsWidgetAtoms::Back)". Then you don't need that ugly boolean.

Comment on attachment 301028 [details] [diff] [review] Patch 2 considerably nicer, thanks!

Comment on attachment 301028 [details] [diff] [review] Patch 2 This is a simple patch to significantly improve accessibility and platform parity.

Comment on attachment 301028 [details] [diff] [review] Patch 2 This patch doesn't seem to really work, as other apps must intercept X events to get to these keys.

Attaching this here so I can test it on a computer with internet keys.

Comment on attachment 301434 [details] [diff] [review] Possible new patch Turns out that is what we want to do after all, its just that this kind of code is used for global listening of special keys (like media players) and properly mapped keyboards will send the event anyway.

Comment on attachment 301028 [details] [diff] [review] Patch 2 Michael are you gunning for the oldest bug fixed award :-P?

Checking in widget/src/gtk2/nsWindow.cpp; /cvsroot/mozilla/widget/src/gtk2/nsWindow.cpp,v <-- nsWindow.cpp new revision: 1.257; previous revision: 1.256 done Checking in widget/src/gtk2/nsWindow.h; /cvsroot/mozilla/widget/src/gtk2/nsWindow.h,v <-- nsWindow.h new revision: 1.84; previous revision: 1.83 done