259307 - Tab key behaviour is not consistent between platforms

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 239175

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Ben Willmore]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

When using the Tab key to move between locations in a page, the resulting
behaviour is very different on the Mac than on other platforms (Win32, Linux). 
Focus seems restricted to text boxes only, whereas on other platforms, focus
moves to buttons and links as well.

This incompatibility is quite disconcerting for cross-platform users.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to washingtonpost.com
2. Click in the 'Search' box
3. Hit Tab

Actual Results:  
Focus moves to an 'Entertainment guide' text box at the bottom of the page. 
Further tabs take you around the other text boxes on the page, then to the
address bar.

Expected Results:  
Judging by the linux version (which seems sensible), focus should have moved to
the 'go' button, followed by the links on the left-hand-side of the page.

Comment 1

[Ben Willmore]

(In reply to comment #0)
 
> When using the Tab key to move between locations in a page, the resulting
> behaviour is very different on the Mac than on other platforms (Win32, Linux). 
> Focus seems restricted to text boxes only, whereas on other platforms, focus
> moves to buttons and links as well.

I now find, courtesy of:
http://sidesh0w.com/weblog/2004/09/01/tabindex_osx_firefox/

that this behaviour can be changed to the linux/windows default by changing
accessibility.tabfocus to 7.  Shouldn't this be set by default?

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 239175 ***