Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:0.9) Gecko/20010505 Hit ESC to get focus and highlight URL bar. This needs to be implemented to allow quick access to the URL bar

um, do you mean inside a document (use ctrl-l) or pressing esc in the urlbar? esc in urlbar was implemented by me. and none of these occur in ns4 on windows.

Yes, hitting ESC while in the document should place focus in the URLbar and select the URL. PS. CTRL+L is not enough for the average user (not intuitive). Your ESC to highlight, *while* already in the URL is a nice step in the right direction, but if a normal user has to use the mouse to get there, he might as well do a double-click.

Not 4xp. I just tested this on Mac and Linux. Doron tested it on Windows. On none does 4.x focus the URL bar on ESC. In fact ESC already has a function. It stops page loading. If the page is loaded it stops animations. assigning to mpt and suggesting this be invalid due to the years of muscle memory this would completely throw away. Peter, you've been filing bugs for a while now. Please don't file them on browser-general when they have an obvious component they belong to (like this one).

Well, basically I'm saying that what we really need is a simple and intuitive way to select and highlight the URLbar. ESC (or Tab) seems to be the best solution. Maybe, it can stop page loading while the page is loading, and select & highlight the URLbar once the page is loaded. In any event, if it comes down to deciding between the two, we should use ESC to select & highlight the URLbar, because this will make IE defectors feel more at home ;)- oops, just realized that IE selects & highlights the URLbar on the FIRST TAB click and not ESC. Maybe this bug should be wontfix. In any event I'll file another bug for select & highlight the URLbar on FIRST Tab click, and you experts can decide which to implement (or maybe even both) - sorry.

changing summary to reflect new broader scope of this bug (tab AND esc to focus/select URLbar) as per zach@zachlipton.com in bug 81404.

Changing summary from "or" to "and/or" - sorry for the spam.

First tab sounds like a good idea to me.

Making tab select the contents of text fields (including the location bar) while focusing them is bug 28583. Making the first tab go to the location bar is bug 31809, which has been fixed. I don't like the first tab going to the location bar, because it forces the user to remember whether anything has happened that would cause pressing tab to have a different behavior and discourages users from getting to be able to use Ctrl+L quickly. Marking as a dup of 28583 because 31809 is already fixed and because changing the behavior of Esc to focus the location bar looks like a wontfix. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 28583 ***