Big IDEA

Firefox 2 broke my access keys!

23 January 2007

I’ve been working in the wiki today and noticed that whenever I tried to use the access key shortcuts available in TWiki (alt + e to edit, alt + s to save, for example), I instead got access to Firefox’s menu. OK, so I figured they must have changed the modifier key, it should be easy to figure out, right? I tried control, control + alt, control + shift, and of course it was the one I didn’t try, alt + shift that did it.

Note to Firefox developers: alt + shift is a very unnatural key combination, even for me who has no motor control issues. How is this change going to benefit users that do have limited motor skills? And why did I have to google to find out how to return things to the way they were? Something like, “Check if this is an upgrade, if yes, ‘do you want to keep your current access key settings?’ else write new access key settings” would have been nice. I don’t mean to bash, I love Firefox, but if you’re going to change a major UI interface, best to let people know during the upgrade.

Sooo, to change Firefox’s access key modifier back to alt + key, enter about:config in the address bar, then set ui.key.contentAccess to 4 and ui.key.chromeAccess to 5. Thanks to David Cummings and stonedyak at the MozillaZine forums for the howto.