Bug: The hotkey to Copy Link L is not usable and must be moved back to the hotkey area
Status: RESOLVED
Priority: --
Resolution: DUPLICATE
Created: 2021-08-07 17:37:27+00:00
Resolved: 2021-08-08 02:47:02+00:00

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.84 Safari/537.36 OPR/67.3.2267.53

Steps to reproduce:

Right click a link and press A.


Actual results:

The link address should have been copied to keyboard.


Expected results:

Nothing.

#SYNOPSIS

No one can use the hotkey L because it is not in the hotkey area. I will show this, and then I will list the precedents for my opinion.

#USE CASE

I have to copy a lot of links for work, maybe more than usual, but that is still a valid use of a web browser. 50-100 a day is not really that much, but it's enough that a hotkey makes a big difference to me.

#ISSUES

Supporters of the L key try to explain it away by saying that it's not broken because the function wasn't removed, it was just "moved". But I don't accept that terminology. "Moved" means moved _within the application_. If you move something straight out of the application, you haven't "moved" it, you've removed it.

If you move a hotkey out of the hotkey area-- not just out of it but _far_ out of it, to L, which is the farthest-right letter key in its row-- you have removed it, because it is so far outside of the application's use area, users cannot use it. Hotkeys are WASD, Q E, ZXC. The 9 leftmost letter keys, and TAB etc. Why? Because that's where your left hand is when your right hand is on the mouse. (Your right hand is definitely on the mouse-- the first half of this hotkey is to right-click the link.)

Go ahead and try it. Try a hotkey from the hotkey area 10 times-- for example A, C, or E (Chrome's key, and Firefox's previous keys). Now try to do the same thing with L. Notice anything? You can't. You have to look down, reach across the keyboard, press L, reorient your hand, and finally reorient your eyes on the screen. The purpose of a hotkey is to prevent exactly that and speed the user up!

###Because of this, I assert that the hotkey for Copy Link has not been "moved", but removed. I assert that using "moved" is incorrect terminology in this case.

#PRECEDENT

My second point is not strong on its own, but becomes stronger when paired with the above: It's that there is no precedent for this. Firefox's key was originally C, then it was moved to A. Both in the hotkey area. Chrome's is E, same. Edge's is CTRL+C according to Google, but I am not willing to install Edge to find out. There is no precedent in Firefox's history, and there is no precedent in other major browsers. (An overwhelming number of other applications also use the same hotkey setup, for the same reasons.)

Precedent is not conclusive proof on its own, but I think it provides backbone to my case. Precedent is a sign that a case _might_ be correct, if its other assertions check out. I believe that they do, and anyone can test for themselves.

#CONCLUSION

I think that I have shown that the L key is not usable for most users. I think the experiment I proposed will show that conclusively an overwhelming amount of the time.

I think I have shown that this change has no precedent, and I propose that it has no precedent because _it is a poor change_, because the hotkey area is on the left, for biological reasons. 

I have spent a lot of time on this issue, and I believe my case is reasonable, logical, and deserves consideration.