Gecko's KeyboardEvent.keyCode value for each printable key is mapped
from an ASCII character which is produced by the key with active
keyboard layout or alternative ASCII capable keyboard layout if active
keyboard layout is not ASCII capable. However, we decided not to use
ASCII punctuation character of alternative ASCII capable keyboard layout
when we compute keyCode value of punctuation keys ("Backquote", "Equal",
"Minus", "LeftBracket", "RightBracket", "Semicolon", "Quote", "Comma",
"Period", "Slash", "Backslash", "IntlBackslash", "IntlYen" and "IntlRo"
keys of KeyboardEvent.code) since we tried to avoid mapping same keyCode
value to 2 or more keys.
However, a lot of web applications still use KeyboardEvent.keyCode even
in these days and they can support only their main target's keyboard
layout. Therefore, if users whose active keyboard layout produces only
Unicode character with punctuation keys like Russian, such keys are not
available on web applications which supports only ASCII capable keyboard
layout (i.e., such users need to switch active keyboard layout to
alternative ASCII capable keyboard layout only while they want to use
keyboard on such web applications).
For making this issue a little better, Firefox 60 will set such keys'
keyCode value to same keyCode value as alternative ASCII capable
keyboard layout only when Firefox 59 and earlier set the value to 0.
So, please not that this behavior change does NOT try to solve
compatibility with the other browsers because it's impossible without
breaking compatibility with Firefox-aware web applications. This change
tries to improve compatibility with web applications which supports
Firefox but assumes users use ASCII capable keyboard layout.
If web applications hit this issue, they should use KeyboardEvent.code
in most cases because they don't check each keyboard layout's key
meaning actually.
The bug to change this behavior:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1036008
Document in MSDN:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEvent/keyCode#keyCode_of_punctuation_keys_on_some_keyboard_layout
--
Masayuki Nakano <masay...@d-toybox.com>
Software Engineer, Mozilla
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