Control-navigation

It is impossible not to notice that in runet, so-called. control-navigation: navigate through the pages of one level using the Ctrl + ← and Ctrl + → combinations . Some comrades even feel uncomfortable when they get to a site that does not support page turning from the keyboard.

Why is this functionality still not implemented in the browsers themselves?

In fact, even the first graphical browser, Mosaic was able to recognize link elements with the rel attribute, provided by the HTML standard for describing links between pages. Such links were displayed in the form of buttons on a special navigation bar.

From modern browsers only Opera can show navigation links (the panel is hidden by default) and Firefox (requires the Site Navigation Bar plugin). As you can see, the navigation bar has not caught on. And what about keyboard shortcuts?
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Together with the navigation bar, keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Shift + ← and Ctrl + Shift + → appeared for scrolling back and forth in the Seventh Opera. At the same time, the browser did not allow to redefine the more usual Ctrl + ← and Ctrl + → for this purpose , which is why, for example, on the Artemy Lebedev website, as a tooltip in the Opera, it is not Ctrl but Ctrl + Shift that is displayed .

When upgrading to version 9.5 as part of the keyboard reform, all navigation shortcuts in Opera were deleted. Moreover, the ability to assign combinations manually was lost, since the commands for navigating the site disappeared . dmitskevich kindly described below how to assign them manually.

In addition, in the Opera, the space not only scrolls down, but also opens the next page when the end is reached. In some ways, this method is even more convenient, if you do not take into account the fact that on some sites you need to scroll back, and not forward.

For Firefox, there is a Link Widgets plugin that allows you to scroll pages using the keyboard. It uses less convenient, in my opinion, Alt + PageUp and Alt + PageDown, they can not be changed. Lite shared a link to the more feature-rich NextPlease plugin ! , among other things, allows you to customize any keyboard shortcuts for navigating through pages, including controls with arrows.

I hope someday the browser makers will realize that for easy navigation through the site you need not so much a separate panel with buttons as standardized keyboard shortcuts. In the meantime, web developers have to implement control navigation manually.

An example of the script is in Tekhnogret, but it contains a significant flaw: the combinations of controls and arrows work in the input fields, in conflict with word movement. For this reason, the control navigation should be disabled in the input and textarea elements, as Habrahabr correctly does .

PS What else, besides paging, would it be convenient to do from the keyboard? In my opinion, there are a lot of shortcuts for site search. Only it should not open a separate page, but simply focus the input field, which is sometimes hard to find. Perhaps, for this purpose, the Ctrl + Shift + F combination is suitable , which in Opera until version 9.5 was just used to follow the link with the rel="search" attribute.