Mon, 30 Mar 2009
Firefox File Input
The daily user-interface annoyance award herby goes to the Firefox (or rather XULRunner,
which means this is present also in Galeon). The problem is in forms
in the <input type="file"> fields. It looks like this:
In Firefox and Galeon, it is impossible to write directly to this field. Which means that even if I already know the file name and can type it really fast, I have to click to the input field, wait for the file input dialog to pop up and get focus, and only then I can type the text in.
Is it possible to disable the pop-up (or make it appear only after clicking
on the Browse button)?
5 replies for this story:
Hynek (Pichi) Vychodil wrote: It's obvious
UI guys are weird. I have realized this when asked our UI guys about this "feature". They replies, it's correct, it's obvious. We surprised with my boss also. You are not alone who think that it is stupid but we are not UI guys, obviously ;-)
Miroslav Suchý wrote:
Touble is that in some browser this input line is not displayed at all. See http://swatelier.info/at/formulare/file.htm It can be done using CSS and JavaScript. See: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/inputfile.html (scroll down)
Edheldil wrote:
There's actually a good reason for this - security. IIRC the input field was deemed as something that could be easily filled by JS with text like "/etc/passwd", its contents sent without user interaction.
Yenya wrote: Re: Edheldil
Well, security can be reason for disallowing Javascript to meddle with the contents of the field, not for disallowing user to type directly into the box.
Erbureth wrote: Re: Edheldil
I actually like Konqueror's solution for this problem: it asks you, whether you really want to upload files, and displays the names.