Cancel highlight/html5 drag/autoscroll events that are in progress (undo events started by mousedown)

Add-ons Development
#1

I have a gesture addon and the trigger to is the primary mouse button + wheel. Once the wheel is scrolled while the primary mouse button is held, all further mouse events are blocked. Until the primary mouse button is released.

However I need to cancel the current highlight in progress, the html5 drag in progress, the autoscroll in progress if any, and ideally any other events initiate by the mousedown. The way I currently do it is use nsIDOMWindowUtils to send a mouseup event (and tap into code to cancel autoscroll) but I dislike this method:

setTimeout(function () {
    var cwin = Services.wm.getMostRecentWindow('navigator:browser').gBrowser.selectedBrowser.contentWindow;
    var utils = cwin.QueryInterface(Ci.nsIInterfaceRequestor).getInterface(Ci.nsIDOMWindowUtils);
    utils.sendMouseEvent('mouseup', 1, 1, triggerButtonNumber, 1, 0);
    console.error('done');
}, 4000)

I was wondering if anyone could brainstorm with me some other ideas please?

I have tried suppressing events with nsIDOMWindowUtils :: supressEventHandling but on unsupress the events continue from where they left off.

Basically what I’m trying to do is undo/cancel/preventDefault any events started by the “Down” of the first mouse button.

#2

The first (and pretty much only) thing that comes to mind is simulating an Esc keypress. (Almost?) all of such actions are cancelled by hitting esc.

1 Like
#3

Thanks that’s a great idea! It might also stop the page loading :frowning: I’ll play with it to see if I can make it stop everything but the page load it’s a great idea!

#4

Good point, I didn’t consider esc might do a little too much.