Optimized Firefox with OS X form goodness

Thanks Chris, Neil, and David... But I didn't see an accessibility.tabfocus under about:config. I'm using FF 1.5. I have .tabfocus_applies_to_xul (which is set to true)... I ended up creating a new integer key anyway, with the appropriate name and a value of 3. And that worked! Thanks so much!

Apologies for the tone, but you hit one of my hot buttons, seeming to waffle on whether or not consistant UI was important. On the one hand, you say that you don't care what they look like, which I feel is irresponsible from someone identifying themselves as a designer, and on the other, you said that the Firefox hack helped unify the look, and was therefore good. It also seems ill-informed to equate the application window scrollbar with elements that are containedwithin a website.
My point, and the problem with this hack (and Safari's choice of rendering) is that there is no standard, and this just pushes things further in the wrong direciton. Unless you style it, your site's forms are at the behest of the OS, browser brand, and browser version, as to how the form controls will be presented. With all of these horrible variations (primarily within the IE family), a designer can prevent that by styling their form controls. Safari, and this presented theming hack, stand out on the other side of the fence, by being the only ones that ignore CSS rules as provided by the site and insisting absolutely that their UI styling is used.
The internet is not a Windows experience, a Mac experience, or a Linux experience. It is its own experience, with unique UI expectations and needs, and I will admit to ranting at any opportunity to promote web standards and demote browser or OS imposed irregularities.
A designer should not have to resort to Flash or other poorly accessible methods in order to have elements described in the W3C's standards respected by any and all browsers. OS versions and browsers and their features are fleeting. Web standards are the only thing designers have to rely on to not render their efforts worthless every six months by the new FOTM. Browsers should be required to uphold and certainly not be allowed to trample on those standards, and especially so by people such as yourself within the design community.

I'm sure the TUAW folks don't want us to start debating design principles here, but I wanted to respond to djones' remarks: "Well, Neil, I'm glad you put "professional" in quotes. A major responsibility that a designer has is to give the user a consistant UI."

First of all, there's no need to be insulting, right? Secondly, isn't part of a consistent UI the idea that form controls don't change from site to site?

I briefly tried this and saw some improperly drawn widgets. Of course the standard for widgets is either Safari or Camino. However, I also enjoy using Firefoxy with Firefox.

> Does this make the radio buttons and drop-down
> select boxes tab-able?

You don't actually have to mess with your user.js file for this. Instead, you can access that preference by browsing to "about:config" from the address bar. (That allows access to Firefox's various preferences, for those unaware.)

So, go to the "accessibility.tabfocus" preference and then change the value of it as you like. A value of 3 (as Neil mentioned) will probably give you the behavior you want. You can can find some info on the different possible values here:

http://scottbrenner.com/archives/2005/12/work_around_for_accessibility.html

Well, Neil, I'm glad you put "professional" in quotes. A major responsibility that a designer has is to give the user a consistant UI. The way you control the data should not be flagrantly obtuse to how you display the data. Every single OS and/or browser has their own styling (most ugly) for buttons and form controls. So one way that you ensure that your users all see and interact with your site in the same way, is to use CSS to style your form controls. I'm not talking about disguising buttons here, or mystery meat navigation. I'm talking about having a slick, well designed site, that is internally consistant in both look and feel.

Bottom line: No browser should be able to dictate style changes or overrule a site's instructions for how to display it's data, unless the user has explicitly called for it in the application preferences with their own style guidelines.

This "browser A renders valid code like this, and browser B interprets and shows that same code like that" is the crap that creates needs for browser hacks, bad design choices, and is irresponsible by browser vendors to stray from web standards that their own companies helped create and agreed to. Whether or not you like to style form controls or not, or you don't care about it, or think it's important, I hope you can agree, as a "professional", that a specific browser trumping your active decision on a design element is inherently wrong.

"This is great for unstyled form widgets on web pages, but does it do like Safari, and use the OS's widgets when a site *does* explicitly style their forms via CSS?"

It does. This is a stop-gap measure to get some better looking form controls into Firefox. That said, I'm a "professional" web designer and I couldn't really care less if the form controls reflect the design on the page. In my view this is no different than sites which style the browser's scroll bar (yes, it only works in IE); buttons and drop down menus are controls, and having a standardized set that look the same from site to site is, in my opinion, a benefit of this hack.

But I understand that what is good for me isn't good for everyone, so I agree that even though I don't care, the final Firefox version (i.e. the official implementation of this) should probably follow the site author's design.

Scott Hughes: you'll just need to add user_pref("accessibility.tabfocus",3); to your user.js file to make all form controls tabbable.

Jonathan Hirshon - Camino and Firefox are two different browsers. Camino has no extension support which makes it a completely different browser and not an easy replacement.

Scott Hughes: I'm pretty sure I'm able to tab through all form options with my copy of Firefox 1.5, and I don't think I've installed any extensions to enable that. If you're on Tiger, are you sure you've turned on Full Keyboard Access under the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab in the Keyboard and Mouse Preferences Pane? (I forget where that option is on Panther) Otherwise I'm not sure what else could be different between our installations.

Or...just use Camino. :)