Change TAB behavior in Firefox
May 17th, 2009
Before I started using Linux as my default OS I used Mac OS for 5 years. In Mac OS the TAB key behaves different in Firefox than Ubuntu (my preferred distro). When using the TAB key in Mac OS it focuses on input fields only rather than every object (images, links, whatever) in a web page .
Today I finally took the time to find out what the difference between the Firefox in Mac OS and Ubuntu. I opened the about:config and searched for “tab”, and what do you know. I found an option called “accessibility.tabfocus” which was set to the value “7″.
A quick google search brought me to this site which tells you everything you want to know about accessibility.tabfocus.
If you want TAB behavior like the one in Mac OS you simply change the value of accessibility.tabfocus to “1″, et voilà, it works!
You can combine options. For example you can set the value “3″ to select any form element on a web page. Read more at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Accessibility.tabfocus.
edit:
For those who didn’t know; you can press Shift+TAB to focus the previous selected element.