Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 141445
Firefox has no keybinding prefs in widgets in non-gnome environment
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:56 EST
Description of problem: Pressing Ctrl-K shifts the cursor rather than deleting to the end of the line in the URL text widget, even though my preferences are for Emacs keybindings. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fireforx-1.0-2.fc3 How reproducible: 1. Ensure that /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme is set to Emacs (use gconf-editor or gconftool). 2. Reboot. Or logout and kill any lingering processes. 3. Start a KDE session. Probably reproducable with other non-Gnome sessions, but I've reproduced it fine with KDE. 4. Launch Firefox from the menu on the taskbar. Click in the middle of the URL bar, and press Ctrl-K. Watch as your cursor appears in the Google/Search box instead of deleting the section of text to the right of the cursor. Cuss (optional). :-) 5. Quit Firefox. 6. Launch gnome-keyboard-properties. Exit. 7. Re-launch Firefox, and re-try step 4. Note that the text is deleted as expected. 8. Have a look at processes that were started ("ps aux" in a terminal). gconfd-2, bonobo-activation-server, gnome-settings-daemon are now running. One or more of these is necessary for the correct behavior of firefox. 9. The firefox startup script should ensure that any required gnomecentric helpers are running. Actual results: Bad keybindings. Expected results: Emacs keybindings. Additional info: As much fun to track down as it was to read :-)
Please note, that gnome-settings-daemon has nasty side-effects in non-Gnome environments. E.g. it overrides your keyboard-setup (~/.Xmodmap) and X-application configuration (~/.Xresources). Because firefox is/should be a non-Gnome application, it should run reasonably without such intrusive helper apps.
I've noticed this bug too in RHEL WS 3 under Gnome, and I haven't been able to find a workaround for it. After searching the web, it looks like this bug is actually a "feature" that Mozilla themselves put into Firefox since version 1.0.1. I'd hate to have to go through all of the diffs between the source code for version 1.0 (which I have installed) and 1.0.3 (which I've just built but haven't installed yet) just to find out where they changed the key bindings, because there is sure to be a ton of other differences. OTOH, I can't stand having the text cursor jump out of the page every time I try to delete a text field. Probably a good place to start hunting down this bug is in one of the .xml files that contains "<bindings>" tags.
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
Closing per lack of response to previous request for information. This bug was originally filed against a much earlier version of Fedora Core, and significant changes have taken place since the last version for which this bug is confirmed. Note that FC3 and FC4 are supported by Fedora Legacy for security fixes only. Please install a still supported version and retest. If it still occurs on FC5 or FC6, please reopen and assign to the correct version. Otherwise, if this a security issue, please change the product to Fedora Legacy. Thanks, and we are sorry that we did not get to this bug earlier.
Just for the record, in case anyone else has trouble with this, I believe the issue was solved be running gconf-editor and changing (or adding) the key /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme to "Emacs".