Grinds My Gears: Facebook login page tab order
“You know what really grinds my gears”, the tab order on Facebooks login page. Most web 2.0 sites I use have the tab order or natural progression of login form elements as such:
- On page load, focus is on the user name field.
- On first tab, the password field is given focus.
- On second tab, the “Remember Me” checkbox is given focus.
- On third tab, the login button is given focus.
Example of the above:
Facebook on the other hand has a tab order as follows:
- On page load, focus is on the user name field.
- On first tab, the password field is given focus.
- On second tab, the login button is given focus.
The “Remember Me” check box is skipped, which means I have to resort to using the mouse. Ugh.
Facebook Login
Facebook could have the check box auto checked, but it might be a safety precaution as a good number of Facebook users access their accounts from public computers. From looking at its html Facebook does not use the tabindex DOM property for setting tab order. The “Remember Me” check box appears before the text fields in the html and since the email field is in focus first, the checkbox is skipped unless you shift-tab back twice.
Sure, logging in only has to be done once, but I run CCleaner once a week to keep my laptop clean so it’s irritating that I can’t “tab, type, tab, type, tab, hit space, enter”.
Maybe I’ll write a simple grease monkey script to change the tab order.
March 29th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Yeah but if you’re running a Greasemonkey script it’s most likely your own computer and you can get away with “Remember Me” anyway.
Either way that bothers me too, http://www.cplusplus.com is the first example I can think of with the same irritating behavior.
April 2nd, 2009 at 7:39 pm
The reason I am annoyed with it is because I clean out my cookies, folders, and my registry each week hence the grease monkey script. I could set CCleaner to skip deleting cookies, but I rather clear everything out.
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Some Facebook recruiter pinged me and asked if I was interested in interviewing with them. I should’ve told them only if they fix their login page
Elton