Bug#308384: epiphany-browser: F7 / browse-with-caret is confusing
when turned on by mistake
Lars Wirzenius
Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi>, 308384@bugs.debian.org
Tue, 10 May 2005 00:43:33 +0300
Package: epiphany-browser
Version: 1.4.8-3
Severity: normal
Epiphany, or possibly Mozilla, has a feature called "browse with caret".
It turns on a "keyboard cursor" in the web page, which can certainly be
handy from time to time. Most of the time, however, it makes it really
annoying, since you can't mix and match between keyboard and mouse controls.
If you try to, long web pages will jump forwards and backwards seemingly
randomly.
The feature is useful, at least to some people some of the time. I don't
want it to go away. However, it seems I turned it on by mistake: almost
certainly by pressing F7. This is easy to do on a laptop keyboard, I may
have tried to press number 6 or 7 instead. Since I didn't know about the
feature at all, I merely started to wonder what the heck had happened to
Epiphany that it displayed a text cursor. Only today have I learned what
is going on (I complained on irc, Michael Bank enlightened me).
The problem here, then, is that it is easy to turn on the feature by
mistake, and both not knowing what is going on, nor how to get rid of
this. There is no menu entry or preferences dialog checkbox that
corresponds to this feature.
Since I know about the magic URL about:config, I went there and eventually
figured out the right setting (accessibility:browsewithcaret), and
turned it off. So far, so good, excpet after I restarted the browser,
it was turned back on. Turns out Epiphany stores the configuration in
two places: the prefs.js file and in gconf.
Suggestion: Add a menu entry to turn the feature on and off.
(Feel free to forward this to upstream. Sorry for not doing that myself,
but dealing with bugzilla is not something I want to do in the middle
of the night.)
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.10-1-686
Locale: LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages epiphany-browser depends on:
ii debconf 1.4.49 Debian configuration management sy
ii gconf2 2.8.1-5 GNOME configuration database syste
ii gnome-icon-theme 2.8.0-4 GNOME Desktop icon theme
ii libart-2.0-2 2.3.17-1 Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii libatk1.0-0 1.8.0-4 The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii libbonobo2-0 2.8.1-2 Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii libbonoboui2-0 2.8.1-2 The Bonobo UI library
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-21 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libgcc1 1:3.4.3-13 GCC support library
ii libgconf2-4 2.8.1-5 GNOME configuration database syste
ii libglade2-0 1:2.4.2-2 library to load .glade files at ru
ii libglib2.0-0 2.6.4-1 The GLib library of C routines
ii libgnome2-0 2.8.1-2 The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii libgnomecanvas2-0 2.8.0-1 A powerful object-oriented display
ii libgnomeui-0 2.8.1-3 The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii libgnomevfs2-0 2.8.4-3 The GNOME virtual file-system libr
ii libgtk2.0-0 2.6.4-1 The GTK+ graphical user interface
ii libice6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-12.0.1 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii liborbit2 1:2.12.2-1 libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii libpango1.0-0 1.8.1-1 Layout and rendering of internatio
ii libpopt0 1.7-5 lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii libsm6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-12.0.1 X Window System Session Management
ii libstdc++5 1:3.3.6-3.0.1 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii libx11-6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-12.0.1 X Window System protocol client li
ii libxml2 2.6.16-7 GNOME XML library
ii mozilla-browser 2:1.7.7-2 The Mozilla Internet application s
ii mozilla-psm 2:1.7.7-2 The Mozilla Internet application s
ii scrollkeeper 0.3.14-10 A free electronic cataloging syste
ii xlibs 4.3.0.dfsg.1-12 X Keyboard Extension (XKB) configu
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.2-4 compression library - runtime
-- no debconf information