Firefox (OS X) Tip-Of-The-Day: Hacking the tab focus on form elements

This is not CSS, but it does drive me batty when I’m creating forms.

Does this bother you, too? When you tab a form in Firefox (on a Mac) it skips the radio buttons, checkboxes, and select drop-down fields. Hate that!

I recently found the hack to fix this:

1. Type about:config in the URL bar.
2. In the Filter field, type tabfocus.
3. Double-click on the accessibility.tabfocus preference.
4. Change the value to 7.
5. Restart your browser and tab away.

If accessibility.tabfocus isn’t in the list (it wasn’t in mine):

1. Right-click on Firefox.app and select Show Package Contents
2. Open /Contents/MacOS/greprefs/all.js
3. Insert pref("accessibility.tabfocus", 7); (I put it where all the other accessibility prefs were declared)
4. Restart your browser and tab away.

~

BREAKING NEWS:
It turns out this tabbing thing is handicapped by default in Mac OS X. However, changing it is simple through System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. At the bottom of that window, it says:

Full keyboard access
In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move the keyboard focus between:

[ ] Text boxes and lists only
[ ] All controls

So there. Just check and you’re done. So my question is, why is it handicapped in the first place??