Comment 128 for bug 66566

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #106)
> So, we apparently do:
> ctrl => .com
> shift => .net
> ctrl + shift => .org
>
> First, I'm not convinced .net and .org are more important than the other
> many tlds around, for example in a localized build it would be far more
> interesting to canonize to the local tld (for example .it for italian). I'd
> totally support ctrl+shift to complete to the localized tld rather than .org
> (though this would require localization support).
> Second, I'd like if ctrl would be the necessary key to activate canonization
> in general, so all the shortcuts should required ctrl to be pressed. Shift
> is far too common when typing and as I said it's already used by
> tab/tabshifted, it's just confusing.
> I understand changing this we could break muscle memory of a minority, but
> it's for a totally undiscoverable feature on less critical tlds than .com.
> and we're changing cmd on Mac already, for which we'll want a relnote.
> I'd honestly propose to drop the shift and ctrl+shift behaviors completely.

Color me surprised when I updated to Nightly 64.0 and found out that the keyboard shortcuts that I've relied on Firefox having for the past 15 years apparently requires some rewiring of muscle memory. This change does make sense and does indeed make it more consistent all around -- but will definitely catch A LOT of long-time macOS Firefox users off-guard if not announced gracefully. This goes the same for keybord-shortcut aficionados/ power users.

It will also require documentation updates (i.e. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly#w_miscellaneous_2 and https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/keyboard-shortcuts-command-qwerty/) since this is literally 15 year old behavior that is changing. It's also been blogged about over the years throughout various websites that cater to the power user (such as LifeHacker and How-To-Geek), but that's nothing that Mozilla controls.

That being said, can we get about:config options to configure the Ctrl-Shift and Shift-Enter shortcuts in the address bar? When this feature was first added, .com, .net. and .org were the most popular of TLD suffixes. Today, I can see how that is different, and I will admit that I do not complete .net and .org domains as often. I agree that not many people used it, but perhaps it can be more accessible if a user can configure those prefixes and suffixes directly.