Why Doesn’t Tab Work for Drop-down Controls in Firefox on OS X?

If you are a recent Mac adopter and are frustrated by the weird tab behavior in OS X, you aren’t alone. By default the Tab key only works for text boxes and lists, but excludes select controls (drop-down menus) on a form when using Firefox.

This is very annoying when you are expecting Firefox to behave the same on OS X as it does on Windows. Thankfully Apple made this into a very easy system preference.

Open up the System Preferences tool and then select Keyboard & Mouse, and then Keyboard Shortcuts.

You’ll see the section at the bottom that says “Full keyboard access”. Here’s where you can change the setting to “All controls” instead of the default.

Note that this will enable tabbing to more than just drop-down controls, so you can now tab to links on a page if you so choose.

Keyboard Method (bonus points)

• Just use Ctrl+F7 to toggle this setting whenever you need to tab to a drop-down box. No need to open the preferences at all.

This little setting should make your switching experience much more friendly.

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. This article was written on 09/21/07 and tagged with: Apple

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Comments (18)

1. November 9, 2007 11:52 am
   J Marler

   I am a recent mac switcher as well, and this page popped up in google for me by searching for “os x tab dropdown”

   Thanks mucho for the advice. That was bothering me immensely, and I was worried that I was just out of luck. Your advice worked perfectly.

2. November 29, 2007 2:40 pm
   B Young

   Oh thank you! I’ve beeb searching Mozilla forums and gave up – found this with a google search. I’m a much happier maccer now

3. December 22, 2007 11:26 pm
   AC

   Yes!! I’ve been a Mac and Firefox user for over 2 years now and this problem has been drive me nuts! its nice to finally have a answer to this bug, thanks!

4. December 31, 2007 5:10 am
   R Prince

   Thanks for the help. Consider myself an accomplished mac user, for over 10 years now, but switched to Macbook pro almost a year ago and have never known the fix for this issue, I finally decided this morning, I was going to find the fix.. thanks to google and yourself, I’m very less frustrated….. Thanks

5. February 12, 2008 4:29 pm
   Dave

   Thank you IMMENSELY for this tip!!!

6. March 25, 2008 12:41 pm
   Galen

   Fantastic tip – very helpful to this new mac user (and highly ranked when searching for “tab to drop down mac fireforx” from Google).

7. April 9, 2008 10:12 am
   PLF

   Thank you so much. I have been looking for a solution to this Firefox problem for a long time. Thank you again!

8. May 22, 2008 4:55 pm
   Karlo

   Very helpful!

9. October 3, 2008 6:21 pm
   Damon Schultz

   Thank you – a rediculous default setting!

10. October 25, 2008 8:59 am
    Dr. Aaron S. Kurland

    Thanks. This has been bugging me ever since I got my Mac. I agree with Damon; why would they make this the default? Dumbth is all I can think of.

11. October 31, 2008 4:26 pm
    Rory

    THANK YOU! This was driving me nuts!

12. December 18, 2008 1:01 pm
    John

    I can’t add much more than has already been said…but THANK YOU nonetheless!

13. December 28, 2008 6:40 am
    Doug

    This has driven me nuts for years. Thank you. One question… Why is this the default setting? It makes no sense. Does anyone know why it is this way? This is similar to the whole right-click mouse issue with Macs (there is the control key workaround). It seems like Mac-o-philes (which I want to be) take pride in annoying settings that drive the rest of us CRAZY.

14. January 23, 2009 6:14 am
    doug no.2

    Thanks, you are the man! Been driving me crazy and I never bothered to check it out til just now and your site popped right up with the answer. Perfect!

15. January 28, 2009 4:05 pm
    Ruby

    howtogeek++
    So simple, and yet so maddening when you only think to check Firefox’s own preferences. Thanks for the quality-of-internet-browsing-life improvement.

16. February 16, 2009 1:03 am
    Scott Weaver

    Wow, thank you tons!

    I honestly thought it was just something I had to deal with on my Mac until I read this post.

    Thank you for saving me hours of frustration!

17. April 4, 2009 1:27 pm
    Joseph

    Thank you so much!

    I recently switched to Mac last October and this is the one feature that had been driving me crazy and that I preferred in Windows! This is awesome!!

    Thanks Again!

18. April 24, 2009 5:34 pm
    Michael

    It’s a fix, but it’s not the problem. That default behavior of ‘Text boxes and list only’ allows you to choose ‘list’ aka ‘drop down menus’ in Safari and with every other Mac browser I can think of other than FF. So it leads me to believe it’s the way FF is implementing it.

    The problem if you choose “all controls” is you have to tab through every single link as well.