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Field tab order in Firefox in OS X
Only a couple things have bothered me during this past year’s transition to OS X. One of them has been Firefox’s issues with tabbing through form fields. Specifically, how it can tab through text fields and textareas but not dropdown lists.
Safari has the the same problem but it is easily remedied via System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse controls. Clicking the Keyboard Shortcuts tab/button at the top and then the radio button labeled “All Controls” will enable tabbing into dropdown lists.
UPDATE: As it turns out (as of some update) the System Preference change above will affect both Safari and Firefox so you do NOT need to do the steps below, if you have all the updates.
But the Firefox fix had been more elusive, until today, I just couldn’t take it anymore and search again. Eureka I have found this post. It is a bit less user-friendly but here are steps to get Firefox forms up to snuff on the Mac:
- Type
about:configin the URL bar. - Click inside the Filter field that will pop up, and type
tabfocus. This will narrow down the listed preferences to accessibility.tabfocus, which is what you want to edit. - Double-click this preference, change the value to 7, and then restart your browser.
This will save me a bunch of time and a good deal of moving my hand to my mouse and back.
This entry was posted by Ben Edwards on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Ben, this is huge. After I switched to a MAC a while ago, this was really the only thorn in my side, that I couldn’t tab through drop down lists (especially with address forms once I got to the ’state’ drop down.) Thanks for posting this, worked like a charm. ...on March 17th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
You have no idea how much this has been giving me the… Thank you. You rock. ...on March 25th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
One addition, for people who don’t have a accessibility.tabfocus entry or only have accessibility.tabfocus_applies_to_xul you will need to right click in the window and choose new | integer from the context menu. Add accessibility.tabfocus as the name and 7 as the value. Restart Firefox. ...on March 25th, 2008 at 6:51 pm