I am in the process of creating a new Firefox add-on that will hopefully change a bit how we navigate some sites. Until now, keyboard navigation for the vast majority of sites has been simply unusable. Even though websites have a layout that can easily use a keyboard, it often relies on either remembering shortcuts or tabbing through. You are almost exclusively limited to a mouse when using a full-featured browser such as Firefox, Chrome, and IE.

Personally, I hate using the trackpad on my laptop. After extended use, the heat and the friction take a toll on my fingers. I have an external USB mouse, but that often becomes a bother as the laptop is moved around from one location to another. Yes, wireless mice, but again we’re not really fixing the problem.

For simple navigation, it’s almost a crime that I cannot tab between links and major components of a web site’s navigation.

The tabindex HTML attribute has gone largely unused when browsing the web. Perhaps for a myriad of reasons – it’s hard to re-order manually, and for many web developers it’s not worth the time or effort.

Even for everyday use, it becomes ridiculous how crappy it the tab key can be. Think about this:

• For a Google search result, the tab key must be hit 12 times before it focuses on your search text. Another 3 tab strikes before it takes you to the first result. Another 5 times or more to get to the second result – not counting Google’s quick links.
• For planet.mozilla.org, each tab key will go through every anchor link in each person’s blog post. Oh, and it takes 6 tab keystrokes to go to the first article.
• For reddit, it can be a little better. If you just use tab, you’ll go through each “share” link first. Which is stupid. If you activate “jump to content” it will go through image->link->domain->usersubreddit->comments. Which is still a lot for one result.

This is how I would order the tab key on a Google search result:

Possible tab order on google

I would probably use the top Google bar the least when doing a google search. Each time you hit tab, it will cycle through the search box, 1st result, 2nd result, etc. until you hit n-th result.

This would be great in an ideal world. A Firefox extension could do this, but for my purposes my extension does not do this. It doesn’t map the tab key. It instead uses the key right above it. Like tab, CTRL+` will cycle forward and SHIFT+~ will cycle backwards.

I call it tabcomplete. It’s not as pretty as tabcandy. I think a large part of my user-base wouldn’t be most users. Users seem content on using the mouse, and that’s fine. But for a guy who works in vim, this is a nice to have extension.

As the addon review queue grows beyond 600 nominated and updated addons, it is more important than ever to make sure your extension passes review the first time around. Editors have a review guide, and a well hidden but publicly viewable set of policies. But here is a quick list of the most cited reasons for addon refusal :

1. Addon should have at least 3 user reviews before being nominated. External reviews count too, but you have to mention them in your nomination message. Softpedia reviews do not count.
2. Wrap your loose variables. All objects, variables, and anything that your addon makes global should be wrapped to avoid conflicts with other addons.
3. Look at the error console. Is your extension throwing up javascript errors? Fix it. There are some options you can set in about:config to help you with this.
4. You break functionality in the host application (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.).
5. Your extension doesn’t work properly, or showing unexpected results. This is what user reviews are expected to catch, but you really should get someone who wasn’t involved to test and report bugs.

There are other less common things that can get you busted too. I’ll just list them here for completeness sake :

5. Including remote javascript/css or other files, anywhere. Include them in your xpi file instead.
6. CSS warnings on the error console if your submitting a theme.

If you have any doubts, check the public policies page linked above.

And don’t ask when your extension will be reviewed in the comments. Because every answer will be the same : When someone gets around to it. It could be sooner if you’d help!