[Kde-accessibility] [Bug 44931] middle click behavior: open link in new window or paste a url

[Philippe Fremy]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44931     




------- Additional Comments From pfremy at noos.fr  2003-05-15 10:38 -------
Datschge, I agree with your point about consistency. I personally hate the autoscroll  
feature of IE. It may be acceptable on windows where the middle mouse button has  
never had any signification but on Unix, mmb means pasting since ages and it  
would be a mistake to change its behaviour too much. That said, middle mouse  
button in konqueror is "open page in new window/tab" when you click on a link.  
  
> > Viewing whatever page with Konqueror, if I middle click on the page and there  
is any   
> > selection inside the clipboard it will open the URL in the location bar.   
   
> No, it will try to open the string in your clipboard in your current view, the location  
bar is just displaying the result,  
  
Is it in CVS ? I am running kde 3.1.1a and I don't experience the behaviour you  
describe. Using mmb in konqueror will make it immediately load the new url, or  
search the file on google if it is not an URL. If we don't have the same behaviour  
already, it is very difficult to communicate on how to improve it.  
 
I think we should all calm down here. I am just trying to present argument why the 
mmb behaviour is a problem in certain circumstances and that this should be taken 
into account. 
 
> Why would you want to use middle click pasting into the window to the whole 
> wide internet world if you don't want it explicitly?  
 
A few reasons have been given already: 
- you come from the windows world and are used to another behaviour from the 
mmb, so you use it all the time. I agree that we should not enable the IE feature but 
it does not mean that Windows habbits should be completely ignored. Transition 
should be as smooth as possible. This is why we allow double-click for example. 
 
- you are a normal legitimate user but at the time you clicked on a URL, khtml just 
resized and you clicked on an empty field 
 
- you suffer from carpal tunnel or other handicap and you are not very smooth with 
your mouth handling so you may miss a link 
 
- [just happened 3 seconds ago while filling this field] you want to paste some text 
into a field box on a html page but you miss the edge of the box because it is not 
displayed. 
 
- you are scrolling strongly with the mouse wheel but do it too strongly and you 
misclick. 
 
So, as you see, middle click in a web page happens for users, for a wide variety of 
reasons. It may not happen to you but it happens to many users, whether they are 
normal users, or whether they suffer from carpal tunnel or simply are converts from 
windows. 
 
I don't think we should simply ignore those users. The goal of KDE is to be a friendly 
user desktop. The current behaviour I am experiencing (direct opening into internet, 
not the one you describe) does have problems because the content of the clipboard 
might be sensitive data: a password or a credit card number. 
 
> If you have problems avoiding clicking the mmb while using the wheel it's more 
> like a hardware flaw for which software can't be made responsible for.  
 
I don't blame the software, but intelligent software should take it into account. 
 
My suggestion is to make something explicit "you want to open an URL with 
konqueror by pasting it" even more explicit by allow it only under location bar.  
 
Another possiblity is the one you describe, where it pops up klipper. But I am afraid 
people won't notice the klipper popup.  
 
Another solution is to popup a dialog to ask the user what he intends to do. That 
way, misclick have an instant feedback so you don't have the "I click on a link and 
wait but nothing happens because I did not realise that I did not click exactly on the 
link".