Why such a massive hotkey redundancy?
locking as a duplicate of https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1073264 - please continue there
I understand that Ctrl+R is "Reload" & Ctrl+Shift+R is "Reload (Override Cache)", but why have both F5 and Ctrl+F5 **also** be "Reload"?
And even if I'm misunderstanding it and Ctrl+F5 is actually just another way to do "Reload (Override Cache)", that's still a redundancy for both. While I can understand the engineering need for component redundancies, I don't think that principle even applies here.
Can someone clear this up for me? Am I missing a crucial part of the rationale here, is it just a remnant of an earlier version of Firefox where it filled a once-existent gap in functionality, or is this just another example of a decision made by someone that makes no sense to anyone else?
Modified by the-edmeister
All Replies (3)
On laptop keyboards, function keys (F1 to F12) are often used for hardware settings (screen brightness, speakers volume…) so you can't use directly F5 key to reload a web page.
Function keys can be used with key combination, Fn + F5 for refreshing, but it isn't easy to do it without move your left-hand when your are taping.
Shortcut Ctrl + R is more accessible in this case.
So it's the 2nd thing I mentioned—that it stems from an earlier time (and I suppose a present time, too :P ) when most keyboards were full keyboards, to be used with a desktop. Right?
Firefox is a multi platform application and not all key sequences are available on all platforms, so in some case there is more than one way to do things. There are also (long lasting) platform conventions that Firefox obeys.