Tab dance

This will probably be of interest only to those of you who use both Firefox and Mac OS X, but here goes. I should preface this by saying that while websurfing, I almost always use keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse. I’ve been using Firefox for a long while now and loving it, but when I switched from my Windows laptop to my iBook, I noticed that on the Mac, Firefox does not have the same behavior for the Tab key that allows you to move focus from link to link on the page. By default it cycles only through text fields. I searched high and low for a way to change this (Firefox is so customizable, I knew an answer had to be out there), but came up empty… until today, via sidesh0w.com:

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.

The 7 allows tabbing not only to text fields (always enabled), but also to links, and form elements like buttons, checkboxes, and lists. Other values specify various subsets of these options.

Yay!