My group is rebuilding one of our websites, and the UI is getting some serious attention. The business and technical groups came to an early decision that we would not be using multi-select listboxes. They alway require special instruction to use, and they are difficult to use for many users. I don't know how long that MacOS has supported this feature. Windows has had the feature for more than 15 years. GTK has a similar behavior in the treeview. But Why, oh why, are we perpetuating such a bad solution.

We use radio button for mutually exclusive options, and checkboxes for inclusive options. I have no issue with the listbox to restrict the view of a large list, but why change the rules of the exclusive/inclusive operation? The problem is the size of the list, not how the user interacts with it. The listbox could, maybe should, display exclusive items as radio buttons, and inclusive items as checkboxes. The user should know by the presentation of the items in the list how the listbox will behave.

Using GTK's treeview to implement the behavior doesn't take a lot of work--just add use a radio button or a checkbox instead of text, and ignore the SELECTION_MULTIPLE property. Putting the checkboxes/radio buttons in a scrollpane is even easier to implement. regardless of the implementation, all listboxes in my GNOME/GTK desktop should behave consistently.

Until I thought about this matter I had not noticed that Gecko/gtkmozembed is forging a listbox control for GTK. Since the listbox was removed from GTK few years ago, Gecko must be using a its own widget to imitate the missing behavior. Still, this behavior, while consistent with other OSes, it is not consistent within each OS. I'm considering using a div with fixed dimensions and overflow to fix the behavior. I'm somewhat uncomfortable introducing non-standard UI behavior, particularly to a Web browser. But I feel that things are so broken, that it would be negligent of myself and my group not to take some action.

To anyone who has any influence of the Mac/Windows interface, please help end the control-click to select madness.