Firefox help - toggling between fields?

[Alinestra Covelia]

^ What it says.

I used to use a Mac at work and the Mac version of MSIE had a nice feature. You could hit Option + Shift (I think) to toggle between fields.

So say you load up IMDB.com. Instead of hitting Tab about a dozen times to get into the "search" field, you just hit Option + Shift once and you're there.

I can't for the life of me find the same function with Firefox. Does anybody know if it's possible or if it even exists?

It would be weird if the old version of Mac MSIE managed to outdo the latest version of Firefox...

[Sir Og]

Edit: I misunderstuud the question.

[MarkG]

tab?

[Kuciwalker]

Huh, I didn't know hotkeys like that existed in the first place... that would be convenient.

Originally posted by MarkG
tab?

You fail

[Dry]

I'm not sure what it is you really ask, but might the answer be Crtl-K ?
Ctrl-K gets you directly to the web-search.
Or do you mean some hotkey getting you directly to the site-search?

[Asher]

The Mac version of Firefox -- in keeping with platform stupidity -- should do this by default, but doesn't select buttons by pressing TAB by default. It's truly brilliant. There's a preference in FF to change this to Windows-like, but anyway...

If you want to jump to text fields, this is handy (among other things):

http://mozless.mozdev.org/

http://mozless.mozdev.org/installation.html

[Alinestra Covelia]

Asher is closest to what I need. I may just download that mozless mod if there's no others available.

A clarification for those of us who don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Say you go to www.imdb.com. At the top of the page is the text field which allows you to search for names and movies. (This is NOT the http location search bar.)

[The search bar can be accessed by hitting Control L in Firefox, or Alt D in FF or MSIE.)

In order to get to the bar, you have to hit Tab several times because it stops at EVERY SINGLE LINK and picture and other Tabable object. (So thanks for the Tab suggestion but that has already been preempted and in fact rejected.)

My question is whether there's any way to get to the search field without tabbing excessively and without using the mouse to get there. I'm a keyboard purist and this is my inquiry.

One good example is the en.wikipedia.org webpage. The search text field (again, NOT the URL search field) is buried about halfway down the left hand margin of the page. Tabbing there will take you half a day because there's shedloads of links in between. Again, tabbing is possible but heavily inefficient.

Wikipedia gets around this problem by allowing you to hit Alt+F to get to the search field. This is only specific to that website however, so it's not a Firefox solution per se.

So far mozless seems closest. The only drawback is that it has a lot of other bundled features and I want to avoid installing too many extra features if it's likely I'll get confused.

[Japher]

Is JohnT still hiding at IMBD?

[snoopy369]

Check the preferences, specifically
accessibility.tabfocus

It should in theory have as values:
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.

and then combinations (so 3 = 1 and 2, 7 = 1,2,4). You probably want either 3 or 1 (1 would only browse text fields, 3 would browse text fields and buttons but not links).

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Accessibility.tabfocus

[Alinestra Covelia]

That sounds like what I need. Could you walk me more gently through it? I'm not very familiar with customizing Firefox. Where do I find the preferences? I've looked in the drop down menus and not found it.

Edit: I'm using Windoze, not Mac, sadly.

[LordShiva]

DanQ chased JohnT away

[snoopy369]

1. Type
about:config
into your location bar in any open tab/window; this opens your configurations.

2. Glance down until you get to the
accessibility.tabfocus
entry (it should be the 3rd entry if you have the same version I do).

3. Double click on the entry

4. Change to 3 (or 1) (or whatever you want INT:0-7)

5. I think that's it ... enjoy!

[Alinestra Covelia]

Nicely! I set it to 3, which means it stops at fields and buttons and menus, but not at actual links.

Excellent help Snoopy!