tony spencer

wow, i always thought macs couldn’t do this, props for pointing this out

Yeah – many thanks. I hadn’t realised this option existed and no tab on dialogue buttons has always been a pet hate of mine.

This is a good tip; thanks for posting.

I just realized the other day that I couldn’t hit the tab key on my keyboard to easily navigate around a page in firefox. Like you say, being able to hit the tab key to submit forms, highlight different text areas and drop down menus, etc., is a very useful feature.

Maybe if we get enough comments in here, google will start listing this page in a more prominent position.

Great tip, thanks!

I am also an old PC user who finally had enough and decided to convert to Mac. This tabbing thing was nearly making me regret it. We should all write to Apple and ask them to make that the default as you said.

Yessssss! You just doubled my productivity.

thanks for posting this trick. for heavy keyboard users, this is a god-send!

Thanks!

“It even works for dialog boxes such as javascript popup confirmations.”

Thanks for the tip but whilst this works on form fields, I haven’t been able to get it to work on dialog boxes.

Thanks so much! I just switched to a new Macbook Pro yesterday, and it took some digging to find how to make this work! Here’s to advanced productivity in OSX.

ZOMG! Thanks so much.

Gotta say, I found this article in trying to find a way to turn it off! It forces extra tabs when going from the subject line to the body text in Mail (quite a nuisance) and the same problem in many other applications, so it’s likely that they don’t have it on as the default for a reason.

Wow, thanks for this! I’ve always missed that feature.

To Sarah, and anyone else having trouble with the dialogue boxes: after you tab to the button you want, hit “space.” That did it for me; I thought “enter” would, but it doesn’t.

God that was annoying! Thanks for posting this and getting a good rank on Google!

This is one of those things I just forgot to google for months, but once I did… One search, 2 seconds, found my answer. Props to google for placement!

Oh my god!! Believe it or not this was the MAIN REASON I didn’t use my Mac more often. (I have Linux, Mac, Windows equally.)

You just made my Mac much more valuable to me. Thank you SO much for posting this.

I was looking for how to turn this off. In Firefox hitting tab would go to every link on the page when I just wanted to get to the form (especially on the Google results page when you want to do a new search). Personally, I’ll take the trade off of not being to tab to drop down menus if I can avoid all the links, but to each his own. Thanks, if for a different reason.

Wow, thanks- that’s always annoyed me but for some reason I never thought about the fact that there might be a way to fix it. Yay for stumbleupon!

It doesn’t work when i’m logged on to an external server. Does anyone now how to make it work?

I’ve been using my brother’s mac, and this has been the single biggest complaint I have with the mac (also the lack of a forward delete button). Knowing how to tab like in windows means I can get a mac now. THANKS!

FYI, shift-tab will allow you to go backwards in the sequence (it takes you to the previous field, instead of the next one like tab will do), and my absolute favorite shortcut is cmd-tab (ctrl-tab on windows), which puts www. and .com on either side of what you typed in the address bar of firefox or IE. For example, if you type google in the address bar, then press cmd-tab, the browser will fill in http://www.google.com and go to that site. Thanks again.

thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you

I wonder if there is a similar option in Gnome. From what I last saw it was not available thus preventing Tabbing to drop downs.

Thanks for pointing that out! While in there i realized that the OS has shortcuts for screenshots too! I thought you had to buy 2nd party add-ons to accomplish this. Thanks for saving me some money!

This is the first time that a blog post has ever been useful to me. Thanks a lot. They certainly didn’t do a good job of explaining exactly what that option did.

forward backspace = fn + delete button. This is a good one.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I had not even associated this to switching to a Mac, which I’m slightly embarrassed about. I switched about six months ago. And all this time I thought I was just crazy – that I had somehow imagined being able to tab to drop-down lists in the past.

THANK YOU. This had worked in Safari for me for some reason, but the inability to tab through forms was the last thing stopping me from switching to Firefox. Now, I’ve seen the light….turns out it was my system prefs all along.

Truly amazing! Thank you for this tip; it really saved my day.

This has been driving me crazy for months! Thank you thank you thank you!!!!

Thank you. You’re right, Apple should make this one a default setting.

Thanks! And also to Julian for forward backspace.

No if I could just figure out how to page down with one hand, I’d be all set

this is one of the first google hits for “tabbing web fields mac” (tho I didn’t put the terms in quotes). Maybe people need better google-fu?

Thanks for the tip, btw. Totally going to save me a lot of hassle

Awesome, you just made my day. Thanks so much!

I LOVE YOU!!!

Wow, I’m surprised this is something that needed pointing out!

I’m so happy I just shed a tear.

THANK YOU!

It took me months to find this solution. Google’s search engine wasn’t very helpful and Firefox help was useless. Thanks so very much!!!

+1 happy mac user thanks to your post

Thanks a million!!!! I had given up using FireFox for a while due to this frustration.

Now I’m happy!!!!!!!!!!

THanks a bunch for this tip!!

Thanks, this was driving me nuts. You are wise.

THANK YOU! I have been trying to make this work for months and I finally found you and this post via a cleverly-worded Google search. THANK YOU! (again)

YES! the fix to the mac keyboard form fields tab bug issue.

Yes!!!! Thank you for pointing that out. I’ve been using an Apple long enough to know that there was a way to do it. I just hadn’t figured it out till now.

And I completely agree about making it default!

You can have my first child for showing me this!!!

Thanks for posting this! After re-installing OSX, I had forgotten how to change this setting, and your blog entry got it head-on very concisely. Thank you.

Thank you!! I just recently made the switch to a Mac and it’s the little things like this that can really make things frustrating!