2007-03-06 21:15
Firefox: Tab focus and the return to Google Browser Sync
Like I mentioned yesterday, I use Foxmarks to sync my Firefox bookmarks.
I’m now at my G5 at home, and got annoyed that tab key behavior in web page forms in Firefox was different than on my other Macs: Tab would only focus on text fields, not checkboxes, buttons or other form elements.
I knew I had done something on my other Macs to rectify this at some point, but I had forgotten exactly what. Of course I found the solution through a Google search.
Firefox 1.5 removed the “accessibility.tabfocus” preference, but it’s easy enough to add it back: Enter about:config in Firefox’s address bar to access all the preference values. Right click anywhere, choose New -> Integer, enter accessibility.tabfocus for the name and choose a combination of any of the following numbers (add them together) for personalized tab key navigation bliss (quoted from Scott Brenner’s site that I linked to above):
- 1 – Give focus to text fields only. (The default in OS X.)
- 2 – Give focus to all form elements except text fields.
- 4 – Give focus to links (and linked images) only.
Like mr. Brenner, I prefer to use the value 3 to exclude tabbing through the many links on web pages.
But it also seemed silly to me that I had already set this preference on one of my computers but that it wasn’t automatically reflected any of the others. What I’d really like is a way to sync not just my Firefox bookmarks, but my preferences too. And in that respect, Foxmarks just doesn’t cut it.
Then I remembered Google’s Browser Sync add-on. Last time I tried it, it didn’t work. But that was shortly after it was launched.
So I thought I’d might give it another try now, as it might have matured quite a bit since back then. And it seems like it works better now, as in “not locking up Firefox on startup”.
I’m just a tiny bit worried about what happens when I sync with my other computers now, since I reactivated sync on the G5, the one of my Macs I’ve used the least lately. Oh well, as long as I back up my preferences on the others before I sync, it should be okay.
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2007-02-24 14:07
Keyboard navigation in Firefox's 'Downloads' window
When I upgraded to Firefox 2, I was hugely annoyed by the apparent disappearance of some of my favorite keystrokes. Especially the dialog that pops up when you enter a new username/password combo at a login page. Before, you could hit R to ‘Remember’ or N for ‘Not now’, but that didn’t work in version 2. Fortunately this was fixed in a later upgrade.
And before version 2, you could hit Enter to open the highlighted item in the ‘Downloads’ window:
This is a pretty big issue for me, as I download pictures at work all the time for use in the newspaper, and hitting that small ‘Open’ link with the mouse is so much harder and slower than using the keyboard.
I thought I’d tried every keystroke possible (Enter, Command-Enter, Space, Command-ArrowDown, Command-O etc. etc.), but today I found it! Hit Tab, and the ‘Open’ link is highlighted in red, like so:
Then hit Enter to open. Tada!
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