I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

ARGH!

I’ve just spent the last 4 hours working on something stupid …

I had noticed something in my installation of Firefox here at home: when tabbing between fields it would not tab into/onto drop down lists, radio lists, buttons, etc., just text fields. Plus, the focus seemed to be out of whack … the focus would seem to move too early on some sites, or not at all on others.

A minor thing … but a huge annoyance, and it was driving me crazy!

I knew that my install at work was behaving fine, and since I use pretty much the same set of extensions there as I do here, I was pretty sure that it couldn’t be an extension. But I couldn’t be TOO sure because I had just noticed it in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve gone on an “installing spree”.

:oops:

Ok. I uninstall all of my extensions. Nada. Then I uninstall all of my themes. (Hey, you never know…) Still nothing. This tells me it’s most likely in my preferences somewhere, probably the prefs.js file.

Oh joy…

Ok, I get the bright idea to uninstall Firefox and reinstall it. Nothing … and what’s worse, I’ve uninstalled all those extensions — a couple of which I’ve lost the “patched” versions and cannot update until either the author fixes them, or I get lucky and find the patched versions again.

I am such a dumb ass sometimes …

Time to switch to Plan B. I downloaded my prefs.js from my work install and do a quick lookie-loo in CSDiff … ugh, the AdBlock preferences and block list are stored in there. That made comparing them a little messy and somewhat tedious.

I got the bright idea to create a vanilla (fresh, like new, no tweaking, changes, etc.) profile and see how it behaves. Ok, the vanilla install behaved fine … but at this point I still had no farggin’ CLUE what was causing this odd behavior.

As a last resort (and what should have been my first stop!), I stopped by the MozillaZine forums to see if I could find anything there. I did a quick query on “tab between fields” and instantly saw a dozen posts from people having problems similar to mine within the last two weeks!

A quick refine and I find that all I needed to do was tweak my accessibility.tabfocus to 7.

Yeah, that’s my “I’m a goober” moment for this week …