Firefox problem: alt+a it is a menu shortcut, not an action!
 

Right now, I am using this Firefox which selects all text in a page when I press alt+a. I use ctrl+a for that, and alt+[anything] must (or should?) be only to access menus or buttons in any dialog.

Both alt+a and ctrl+a work and are doing the same thing: select all.
/=

Furhter, one main menu should open when I type alt+a, and it does not.

Can I fix that? How?

Weird. I can reproduce this.

But why should it open anything on the main menu? The alt bindings in the main menu I have here are:
F -> File
E -> Edit
V -> View
s -> History
B -> Bookmarks
T -> Tools
H -> Help

What makes you think Alt+A should do anything useful?

I saw a thread in the mozilla support database that stated that alt+a used to be Find->"Highlight all" but was now replaced by Alt+L.

Did you mean that "you *cannot* reproduce" where you wrote "I can reproduce"? Right?

My menu is not in English, like the options you listed. "A" is the "Arquivo" menu, which is translated from "File".

So ALT+A means "open the file menu", but it weirdly "highlights all text".

For those who wonder, my Firefox menu shortcuts are:

Arquivo -> A
Editar -> E
Exibit -> X
Histórico -> H
Favoritos -> V
Ferramentas -> F
Ajuda -> U

No, I meant I can reproduce it. And I was surprised by it.
Ok. That explains. I am wondering whether this is actually a bug in Firefox. Maybe it was introduced when changing the Find-> Highlight all shortcut.
You may want to file a bug for firefox.

And that was a surprise I did not imagine as the most probable! >,<

Shortcut... maybe there is a way to change the "select all" second shortcut, at least for my user? I searched for shortcuts options, even in about:config, but I did not find it.

A medium old page, among others, teached users how to change FF shortcuts:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-c...ard-shortcuts/

A bug... I will report it, if it really is one.

To change keyboard shortcuts... is it really possible? Seems *not*!
 

The page I pointed points to a Mozilla page about keyboard shortcuts. Its address seems stable, imagining far future reads of this thread. Today, the page says:

Thinking about removing the "extra and bad" shortcut for selecting all, I installed the above extension. I have not done *anything* else, just restarted FF to enable it. The problem is solved! - no, it is not!!! In the extension's tab, ALT+A brings my file menu, good, that should always be true now, right? No. In the other tab, with this thread preview window, ALT+A selects all text (in the page or in the textarea, depends on focus).

I cannot figure what I need to do now. How do I customize shortcuts for things that are *not* in the menus? "Edit > Select all" with its ctrl+a is there, but where is that alt+a?? Is this a clear bug in Firefox?

Read the last post, possibly again. It was edited hours after it was posted, so you may have missed it. And it points why the thread is not (yet?) solved.

I'm not really sure about that, but it looks like it is handled by Gnome (at least for me), so the app (firefox) has no any chance to catch it. But I don't know if you use Gnome at all.

I think that it is a Firefox problem because... (...). Am I wrong?
 

I use Firefox in: Gnome 2, Mate (right now I am in it) and (eventually, like once per week) a Windows machine.

It is strange to me, to say that it may be the window manager. And if it were, wouldn't:

1) ... I be able to change that shortcut in the manager configuration? (I tried right now, 'select all' is not among the shortcut options);

2) ... every program behave the same?

"Arquivo" menu with (alt+a) is something that most graphical programs have. Right now, I tested in Pluma (which is Mate's notepad, renamed from Gnome2's). I wrote any text in its window, pressed alt+a and it does what we would expect: it opened the menu. Right now, I also tested in a FF's brother, Thunderbird. Its compose window has "Arquivo" (alt+a) menu. Wrote some text in the message, pressed alt+a and it opened the menu. Back to Firefox tab, alt+a selects all text in this "reply to topic" tab textarea.

i have no solution to offer, but i can confirm the behavior on seamonkey 2.46 (!) - so it's not a new thing - Alt-a does exactly the same as Ctrl-a. it does seem braindead.
and it's not the first time i ask myself if hotkeys can be edited/changed in mozilla browsers.

edit:
oh yes, no gnome anywhere on my system. plain openbox.

I can confirm that this happens outside of gnome over here. I am using i3. Which is probably pretty much as far as you can get from gnome...
I vote for this being a bug.

Thank you for the post #11, ondoho. I will point this thread when I contact Mozilla about the issue. Funny that Seamonkey inherited it, I have used it before (but did not note the issue before, or I forgot).

Small side joke: People in Brasil do not care much if they have to click the "Arquivo" menu instead of alt+a'ing to open it!?

Thank you too, joe_2000 (:

Have you filed a bug report? Would you like to post the link?