Web pages that capture keypresses are evil!
I hate it when I encounter a web page that tries to be fancy and make its own hotkeys to navigate within the page. Well, I usually hate it anyways. I like that gmail has keyboard shortcuts, and the most important thing is that their keyboard shortcuts are simple (letter keys) and only affect the behavior of the gmail site. They don’t capture keypresses that would ordinarily be handled by my browser, like Alt-F (I’ve depended on that to open the ‘File’ menu in every web browser since 1995 or so, and most desktop apps as well.
But someone at AOL/Mapquest thought it would be clever to intercept Alt-[key] events (probably not a complete list, just what I noticed):
Alt-F: redirects you to their ‘Find It’ page (should open browser’s ‘File’ menu)
Alt-D: redirects you to their ‘Directions’ page (should put cursor focus in browser’s ‘Location’/'Address’ bar, with current location selected)
Alt-M: redirects you to their ‘Maps’ page (I’m not aware of any default browser behavior for this)
Alt-H: redirects you to their main (Home) page (should open browser’s ‘Help’ menu)
While I applaud them for thinking about keyboard navigation, I don’t like their choice of keys.
Another site, Uncyclopedia, captures Alt-keys as well:
Alt-H: move cursor focus to their ‘history’ tab at the top
Alt-F: move cursor focus to their ’search’ box in the sidebar
Alt-E: move cursor focus to their ‘view source’ tab at the top (should open browser’s ‘Edit’ menu)
Now, there are certainly workarounds that I could use to allow me to continue controlling my browser with the keyboard:
- Some browser features have multiple keyboard shortcuts; I could force myself to learn different keys.
- I could try to find/create a plug-in/add-on/extension for each of my browsers, to allow me to either:
- reassign my browser’s keyboard shortcuts to work around these web sites(see #1 above)
- prevent web pages from being able to capture these keypresses, perhaps with options to toggle this feature for the current site, etc.
- Stop using web sites that steal my favorite keyboard shortcuts
- Use a different browser, such as Opera (which seems to be immune to the evil put forth by the 2 sites above)
But I just feel like I shouldn’t have to do extra work because of these sites… their web developers should respect the common keyboard shortcuts used by the big players in the browser market today (IE and Firefox).
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