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I just removed IceWeasel from my Debian machine and replaced it with Firefox so I could test the website I'm developing in the more popular browser in case there was any minute differences and I noticed that google's keyboard navigation no longer works. I've done some searching (the hard way, with the mouse :P) and I can't find any mention of a link between Debian or firefox and problems with google keyboard navigation.

When I press the up and down keys, the whole window just scrolls. Also when I press the tab key, firefox just moves from link to link (starting with the google tools links in the top left-hand corner) and takes 10 - 15 tabs before it gets to the search results.

I read somewhere that google instant wasn't available in all countries (or, at least it wasn't some time in the past.) I use google Australia, but I've also tried - via an international proxy server - google.com and I still get the same results.

I also like to have images disabled for general browsing due to strict bandwidth allocations and I thought perhaps the feature was working, but not displaying the blue arrow indicator. However, when I enabled images for google.com and google.com.au, there was no observer change in behaviour (except for the images showing up.)

Has anyone else experienced this problem, either using firefox, or under any other conditions?

newUser
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  • If Google Instant is gone, good riddance! But what does this have to do with programming? – derobert Jan 22 '11 at 07:34
  • It works in my firefox. Could this be a control box focus problem? Obviously your keystrokes are not caught by the search box and is bubbled over to the page scope. ( hence the scrolling) – uncaught_exceptions Jan 22 '11 at 08:03

1 Answers1

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The broken keyboard navigation I'm encountering type ahead find. Particularly, typing, optionally beginning with '/', is directed to the search box, regardless of the document element with focus.

There are two ways to fix this:

  1. Use the general.useragent.override pref to remove "Firefox/XXX" from the user agent string.
  2. Use a userscript (Greasemonkey) to reclaim keyboard navigation (theoretical)
sdfaasf
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