Morph keyboard popup behaviour

[Intrinsically-Sublime]

• Device: Oneplus 6T Fajita
• Channel: Stable
• Build: OTA-21

Steps to reproduce

Open Morph and with "Homepage" set to "New Tab Page" and go to any site. Slide up from the bottom and press "New Tab".

Expected behavior

It opens the new tab page and allows you to select from one of your bookmarks or the history.

Actual behavior

It opens the keyboard and covers half of the history making you have to swipe the keyboard down before you can press something. The keyboard should only appear when you enter a text field and not by default. It appears to focus on the address bar and open the keyboard to type there which makes no sense to me since I have only typed in the address bar maybe ten times in the 2+ years I have used Ubuntu touch. Yet I use the browser dozens of times a day.

If this is "Feature" that has been added can you please make it optional like it the messages app. (Not sure why you wouldn't want the keyboard to popup while in a messaging program made for typing and then want it to popup in a browser on a page of links to be clicked.)

[balcy]

this behavior was introduced via #417 (it contains a discussion about it, too)

[kugiigi]

Well, this obviously shows how different people thinks and do things 😄
I made this change because I think most people opens a new tab to search or go to a website. For me, it's mostly search so popping the keyboard automatically makes sense. I'm not dismissing your use case though. It's obviously valid.

However, I don't think adding an option is ideal. If we have an option for every thing that we have split preference/opinion then we'll have an infinite settings page. In this case, we went for the middle ground and unfortunately for you, you got the shorter stick 😅

I think the decision for this was made by answering the question - which is easier? swipe down the keyboard or tap the address bar. If I understand correctly, you have an issue with swiping down the keyboard, perhaps that's the issue that needs to be fixed?

I guess the most ideal solution is to put the search/address bar near the bottom in the new tab page similar to popular mobile browsers. However it's not easy to do technically.

[Intrinsically-Sublime]

It is true we are all different and a page full of options sucks but it is not like the browser has almost any options as it is and adding one will not create a page full of options. There is also the old way of letting people makes changes in a config file to avoid too many options in the menu.

The thread in which the decision was made only really had one vote to make the change which to me is not really getting an idea of what the general preference is and that was after acknowledging it is not the default in other browsers. If we go by the most common than that is to focus on page content.

As for swiping down. Well you have to touch in just the right spot and then swipe down far enough. If you miss touch you select the page content behind or you press a letter. Then if you do not swipe far enough down that it pops back up.

I keep different search engines in my bookmarks and use them based on what I am looking for and so using the address bar as search bar is of no use and typing in a full url is silly when a search engine can complete it for you faster.

Either way this issue is the least of the problems. There are two others making the phone unusable right now in OTA-21.

[Fuseteam]

this sounds more like we should make it easier to dismiss the keyboard when it's popped up on the new tab page.
for example tapping above the keyboard should dismiss it, scrolling the page should dismiss it.

also morph's default search engine is duckduckgo. so technically you could also make use of duckduckgo's bangs:
typing !g and pressing enter takes you to google !startpage takes you to startpage !bing takes you to bing !w takes you to wikipedia and so on, it has support for thousands
oh and !w ubuntu touch will open the wikipedia page of ubuntu touch xD