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How do the hotkeys in about:preferences#privacy page work?

  • 9 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by aspis

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The underlined letters (e.g. _R_emember logins and passwords for websites, at the top) don't seem to work (either with Alt+R or Alt+Shift+R - Ctrl+R and Alt+Ctrl+R are for other purposes, of course)). Are they "fake" (not implemented) or are they deactivated and need to be activated?

I am referring to Firefox 57 (Quantum)

The underlined letters (e.g. _R_emember logins and passwords for websites, at the top) don't seem to work (either with Alt+R or Alt+Shift+R - Ctrl+R and Alt+Ctrl+R are for other purposes, of course)). Are they "fake" (not implemented) or are they deactivated and need to be activated? I am referring to Firefox 57 (Quantum)
Attached screenshots

All Replies (9)

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As this is so-called "in-content" for pages, you need to press Shift + Alt + the key itself.

Do note that not all keys may work, or they will toggle to duplicates, as there can be dialogs with too many characters.

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Please read the problem description before replying so that we don't abuse the space provided in this helpful forum! I said that Alt+Shift+R doesn't work either. Except if you think that Shift+Alt+R differs! :)) As for "not all the keys work", neither Shift+Alt+A οr Shift+Alt+Β work So what's the use?

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That is how it is supposed to work with using Alt+Shift, but unfortunately on the about:preferences pages this only works for a few cases. For me Alt+Shift+R only brings up one real working result and that is "Use hardware acceleration when available" (pressing the space bar will toggle this choice). The page code in the Inspector however comes up with 10 results for accesskey="r" that can't be reached for some reason.

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Thanks. Unfortunately FF programmers improves some (minor) things but at the same time spoil other. Yet. FF is still my favorite browser by far. So let's sacrifice some small conveniences and minor issues like this one! :)

Modified by aspis

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Glad to see you can live with it and are still happy with FF, but please remember to remain friendly in this "helpful forum." Despite my limited vision I did read your text and I hope you read mine :) - basically you got your answers in the first reply, including the disclaimer about some of them not working, and why.

The only addition I can make is that they had less priority for the 57 (or even 56) release, changing the most important ones to others to minimize duplicates and perhaps to make more sense was a suggestion for localizers (though I don’t think any of them changed for en-US), rearranging the preferences panel(s) due to the lack of access keys was not an option, and some issues (see above) turned up that may be resolved at a later point. Perhaps that explains other concerns in your other question about these keys. If you’re interested in bugs, this one or related ones may be worth checking - they may provide more background / development info than this forum.

Feel free to mark any reply as solution.

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Hi Tonnes I read your comment and I am sorry if I offended anyone in this helpul indeed forum or FF staff who are doing a great job!! Really. My tone comes mainly from the frustration I get with changes in S/W, and not only in FF. I didn't have this and a lot of other issues in the past. Of course FF has evolved and it should do so as every other S/W. But, I am a professional programmer, and I never change anything that works well. So, my tone also comes from my high standards.

To summarize: I wouldn't have ever brought up this subject if I did not have to allow and disallow cookies very often (a dozen of times daily). And it is quite annoying to have to do 4 clicks everytime: 1) on Privacy & Security, 2) on Accept Cookies, 3) on Accept third-party cookies and 4) and on selecting "Never". All this could be done with 3 keypresses (no mouse), which is much faster and not annoying.

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You should look into one of the many cookie manager addons. One particular addon which I like is Self Destroying Cookies. Its mostly invisible but also features fine grained controls.

Regarding hotkeys, Firefox employs a standard mechanism, which as you notice, has its shortcomings. The search bar on the settings page is already an improvement over this and doesn't even require mouse movement because it's automatically selected. For true mouseless browsing I encourage you to take a look at Tridactyl or something similar.

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You can consider to open about:preferences in one or more pinned tabs for easy access and use its search bar to show specific sections.

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ViciousPecan: Thank you for the references. I will try them. BTW, the webpage is in German. For anyone interested, the English webpage of Self Destroying Cookies is here.

cor-el: Not a bad idea. Thanks.