422532 - Form usability regression: controls with tabindex set are reached after links and controls with no tabindex set

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 383109

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[Brion Vibber]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030317 Firefox/3.0b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030317 Firefox/3.0b4

In Firefox 3.0 beta 4, tab order of form controls and links has changed.

In Firefox 2.0 and other browsers (tested Safari 3, Opera 9.26), the tab order is as follows:

1) Form controls with a positive 'tabindex' attribute, in ascending order
2) Links and form controls without a 'tabindex' attribute, in order of appearance
3) Chrome (find bar, URL bar, search bar, etc)

In Firefox 3.0 betas, this behavior has changed to:

1) Links and form controls without a 'tabindex' attribute, in order of appearance
2) Chrome (find bar, URL bar, search bar, etc)
3) Form controls with a positive 'tabindex' attribute, in ascending order

This makes it very difficult to use forms with the keyboard, as form fields which have explicitly set tabindex values to aid in usability become virtually unreachable -- such as on Wikipedia's login form.

I believe I saw this behavior in earlier FF 3 betas, but didn't track it down precisely.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Userlogin
2. Hit 'tab'

Actual Results:  
Cursor jumps to highlight 'Main Page' link in sidebar.

Expected Results:  
Cursor should jump to the 'username' field, which has tabindex="1".

This is filed in MediaWiki's bug tracker as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13329

Comment 1

[Jeremy Baron]

tested in 3.0b3 and 3.0b4 per downstream bug.

Comment 2

[Brion Vibber]

Went through nightlies... Regression happens between April 14 and April 15, 2007:

Works: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2007/04/2007-04-14-04-trunk/

Fails: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2007/04/2007-04-15-04-trunk/

Comment 3

[Brion Vibber]

And just to be complete; confirmed it on Win32 as well. :)