Things I can’t do in Firefox without using a mouse
March 14th, 2007 by 
Phil
- turn Greasemonkey on and off
- tab out of Flash widgets (can tab into them, but then can’t get back out to the page again)
Rather astonishingly, for the things I want to do frequently, that might be it. Nevertheless the Flash thing catches me out every single day.
Tagged: accessibility, firefox | 
8 Comments »
No easy way to tab out of a Flash widget, sadly, seeing as it’s an embedded application that captures the focus. I get caught as well, both with tab and by trying to use the scroll wheel on the mouse.
I’m sure someone could come up with a plugin that would allow it. As for Greasemonkey usage, maybe hacking the Chrome gubbins would allow it?
Posted by Irregular Shed on March 15th, 2007 at 10:07 amFor flash, that’s just crazy. There must be a way of allowing users to get out of it, even if it’s another keyboard shortcut. I was expecting that F6 would work, but it doesn’t. Once your tab focus is inside a Flash widget, it’s trapped forever. Lame.
Yes, some Chrome gubbins would allow it (I suppose there might already be a keyboard shortcut that I just don’t know about), but it should be part of the base install.
Posted by Phil Wilson on March 15th, 2007 at 10:32 amThere must be a way, when you have a screen reader it provides a way. (Although perhaps it is via Flash and the screen reader, rather than a browser command?)
Posted by Alastair on March 15th, 2007 at 2:49 pmA similar problem that’s been irritating me recently is that you can’t tab out of a rich-text editing context in Firefox. You can, however, shift-tab (backwards) out of one. Bug 190513 (opened Jan 2003).
Posted by finn on March 15th, 2007 at 3:10 pmSee also bug 78414.
Posted by Anonymous on March 15th, 2007 at 3:56 pmAssuming you are using keyconfig extension:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/keyconfig
You can add a bit of js to make the change to nsIPrefService.
var prefs = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIPrefService);
prefs = prefs.getBranch(“greasemonkey.”);
prefs.setBoolPref(“enabled”, !prefs.getBoolPref(“enabled”));
Let me know if you need more help with keyconfig.
In regards to the flash issue, one thing I have found that helps quite a bit is the flashblock extension:
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
This prevents flash from trapping your keypresses, and mouse wheel scrolling.
Posted by Greg on April 8th, 2007 at 5:11 pmThanks Greg, I do do those things on my own PC, but for the Flash issue in particular I’d rather not have to remember and install an extension for something that should be part of the native build. I consider this to be a serious usability issue.
Posted by Phil Wilson on May 6th, 2007 at 10:36 pmI am hoping this bug will be closed soon:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414
Things like this:
Reported: 2001-05-01 14:28 PDT by dave shultz
Tends to make me wonder how a bug of this sort can be left for this long.
Posted by Greg on May 9th, 2007 at 3:44 am