Jun
5
2005

tabfocus

One of my pet peeves with Mac browsers is that, unlike on the PC, I can tab to every element on an HTML form except drop-down menus. I stumbled across a fix for this in Firefox a while back, but needed to look it up again after reformatting my computer when I installed Tiger. Storing the answer here for future reference:

  1. In the Firefox URL field, type: about:config
  2. Find the entry accessibility.tabfocus.
  3. On my installation, tabfocus was set at 1 by default. According to the documentation, the following settings can be used:
    • 1: Text field form controls only
    • 2: All form controls except text fields
    • 3: All form controls
    • 4: Hyperlinks and hyperlinked images
    • 7: All form controls and hyperlinks
  4. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve changed my tabfocus to 7.

Now if only there was some way I could change the default key command to change tabs. Safari uses a different key command (cmd-shift-arrow), which seems to have gotten hard-wired into my brain when I want to swap tabs in Firefox (ctrl-tab).

Posted at 7:45 PM in technology

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