396534 - RFE: Make default Mac accessibility.tabfocus the same as other platforms

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[jwq]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070802 SeaMonkey/1.1.4

In the "Find in this Page" dialog, pressing the tab key will not select the next element in the UI (i.e. the checkboxes) but instead highlights the text in the "Find text" input field. Mozilla would switch focus to the next UI element when the tab key was pressed, and I understand that this is the behaviour exhibited by SeaMonkey on Linux, so obviously something is broken on the Mac.

Comment 1

[jwq]

 Currently, the accessibility.tabfocus setting for the Mac defaults to take the system setting for Full keyboard access (System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts). Other platforms set accessibility.tabfocus explicitly (see <http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/modules/libpref/src/init/all.js#129>).

 If I turn on the Mac system setting to obtain the behaviour I want in SeaMonkey, the side-effect is an undesired increase in general system complexity 
[the system setting ON makes working with the Mac system dialogs quite cumbersome - the save dialog has 15 tab-able elements with this setting on and only 4 with it off].

 Due to this side-effect I think it's better to have the Mac follow the other platforms and share the same default (accessibility.tabfocus defaults to allow all UI elements to be selected with the tab key). Could this please be changed?

Workaround: The old behaviour can be obtained by setting accessibility.tabfocus to -1 in the prefs.

Thanks to Neil for telling me most of this on IRC.

Comment 2

[jwq]

 See Bug 187508 and the large number of bug reports, duped to Bug 187508, complaining that Firefox/SeaMonkey on the Mac either doesn't behave in the way that the user expected.

 Having to set a preference which has system-wide effects to obtain a behaviour I (and, it seems, others) want which is specific to Firefox/SeaMonkey and which is present by default on other platforms, and past versions, is not really all that helpful.

Comment 3

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

We just do what other mac apps do (or should do), so the behaviour isn't specific to Firefox/SeaMonkey/Thunderbird et al. If I have the Full Keyboard Access disabled I'd expect it to affect SeaMonkey as well.

Comment 4

[jwq]

 What I want is to be able to use the tab key to select the checkboxes in the "Find in this Page" dialog in SeaMonkey, as it used to in Mozilla.

 This is a behaviour specific to SeaMonkey (I don't necessarily want to have this in other applications) and, in fact, specific to that dialog (I don't necessarily want this behaviour in other SeaMonkey dialogs). I don't want to have to set a system pref which has system-wide effects to obtain that.

 In point of fact, I note now that setting accessibility.tabfocus has undesired side-effect of making every element - including links - in the main window tab-able (potentially hundreds of elements on pages which display scientific papers, due to the references) so that it's not possible to switch quickly to the location bar by pressing tab, as it was in Mozilla.

 SeaMonkey accessibility as it stands now is a very blunt tool which gives either famine or glut and nothing in between. Meanwhile all I want is the simple, but useful, behaviour I had in Mozilla. What other Mac apps do (or don't do) is irrelevant.

Comment 5

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter "spam" on "guifeatures-nobody-20080610".