RonakPatel.Net

“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:

Twitter

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.