Wed, 05 Sep 2007

Firefox on Mac OS X tab problem

Posted by Ben Wed, 05 Sep 2007 21:33:00 GMT

An unexpected behaviour of Firefox on OS X is that when tabbing through web pages, especially forms, certain elements are skipped. This is quite annoying when form filling since you cannot tab to the “submit” button (or use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google without resorting to the mouse).

Correcting this is in fact very simple!

Tabbing problems in Firefox in Mac OS X

The solution I found to the problem was somewhat unexpected. How to address this is that the end user have to turn on Full keyboard access > All controls in System Preferences for it to work as expected. Like this:

1. Open System Preferences

2. Go to Keyboard & Mouse

3. Select All controls for Full keyboard access

Alternatively you can add / change the accessibility.tabfocus Firefox option via about:config to one of the following:

3 to be able to tab to form controls or 7 to be able to tab to everything

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  1. Yayo about 1 hour later:

    THAT’S it!? I’ve been dealing with that stupid issue for years now… thanks!

  2. Thomaz about 2 hours later:

    Actually, it isn’t about:blank, but about:config. :)

  3. Ben about 22 hours later:

    Thanks Thomaz, I’ve corrected it now.

  4. Metaltoad 4 months later:

    Awesome, dude! This was driving me crazy!

  5. Steve 6 months later:

    FWIW, the “about:config” tabfocus setting doesn’t appear to exist anymore…

    Steve

  6. John Barker 7 months later:

    Keyboard & Mouse -> Select All controls for Full keyboard access ... Works like a charm now! Thanks for the tip!

  7. Jamie 9 months later:

    Thank you so much. I was getting so annoyed. Funny thing is that Firefox, Safari were the browsers that had the problem and Opera and Camino actually had the working tabs.

Comments