GW, and listers, On the list, time and time again, we have seen complains that the newer versions of Firefox has some challenges in working well with Window-Eyes. The main problem, that many points out, is that if you leave a page for a moment, then return to it - you are thrown back to the top of the page. In cases where you are looking through a list of search results for instance, this behavior could be rather time consuming, and quite frustrating. And personally, this has been one of the biggest reasons, for me not to have Firefox as my number one browser. The behavior is not known to be too much showing up in Internet Explorer.
>From earlier, I seem to remember, GW told us the problem sits with Firefox. >That it somehow is a "bug" in Firefox, that came around in version 4 or >something like that. At least, it shows up in all the newer versions of >Firefox that I have been in touch with. A couple of days ago, I ended up using Firefox in combination with NVDA. I was a bit surprised, when I seemed to have no such "Throw me back to the top, 'cause I have just left the page for a second, and am now returning" behavior. I firstly thought, that it could be due to the page I happened to visit. So, this morning, I decided to take the thing to the real test. I did as follows: First I started Window-Eyes, and then opened Firefox. Here, I went to the search page of Yahoo. I entered a search query, and got a few thousands results. Now, I arrowed down the page, and in the list of results, hit Enter on the third result. A new page opened, and I could read the stuff I was presented with no problem. After reading through the material, I closed the tab (Ctrl-F4), and was back on the page with all the search results. Only, as all you Firefox users will know, my cursor was now "thrown back" to the top of the page, and I would have to refind my last position in the list of results; manually. So far, nothing new. We all know this behavior, and I guess more than me are frustrated about it. Based on my experience the other day, I now decided to close down WE altogether. then started NVDA. Went back to the Yahoo page with my search results. Scrolled down to result five, and hit Enter. The page was opened, I read it, and closed the tab. All as in the paragraph above. BUT! The big difference between WE and NVDA now showed up in its full. When I was returned back to the Yahoo result page, I was right back on where I left it, on result five. No throwing me back to the top of the page. I repeated the test, with same results. Using NVDA, I would reliably be put back where I left the page. Now. If the "Throwing Me Back To The To" really is a bug in Firefox - why then, is it not appearing in NVDA? What could it be, that NVDA has done so as to overcome "the bug", which WE has not been able to do, even in the newer versions of the screen reader? I am sorry to ask this, but could it actually be, that the "bug" does not exactly sit in Firefox? You would expect, if it was a real Firefox bug, that it would have been showing up with both screen readers; wouldn't you? I could have been quite interested, if any of you who have access to a version of Jaws, could let us know if the "bug" creeps in with Jaws as well. Really wish, we had a fix for the wearisome behavior in WE as well. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
