Monday, January 18, 2010

Firefox on Mac OS X tab problem

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