Tab Key goes to next search Tab in Yahoo

Couldn't find a post about this -- is this new?

[whoisgregg]

At the Yahoo home page search field [yahoo.com], when you hit the "tab" key on the keyboard, the search field cycles through Web, Images, Directory, Local, News, and Products before moving on to the next field. Very slick interface.

This work in all browsers? And is this new? I tried site searches but "tab" and "key" show up all over the place. Including a really weird misspelling of "tabke," can't figure out that one. ;)

[martinibuster]

Neat.

[whoisgregg]

It should dramatically increase the "discovery" rate for those other search services and might even increase use.

[whoisgregg]

And today, the exact same functionality, heck the same design elements find their way onto the MSN.com new homepage?

I mean... come on. MSN could have at least pretended to not straight up steal this.

[hdpt00]

This has been around for a long time. Nothing new.

[whoisgregg]

See all somebody had to do was point that out the first time I brought it up and I wouldn't have to feel silly for making a big deal about it. ;)

[BigUns]

whoisgregg:

FYI: Go to Google or just about any other web page - hit the tab key repeatedly and you will move about the page from link to link (look for the dotted 'focus rectangle') - hit the enter key and you will navigate to that link. You can actually navigate about most web pages without a mouse - just use tab and enter. (There are some additional complexities involving iframes, the tabindex attribute etc but you get the idea.)

[whoisgregg]

That's browser technology, not intentional design. If you go to Yahoo's page or MSN.com's page you'll see what I'm talking about. They have javascript stuff going on that is not standard. (And is not on Google's front page.)

[bmcgee]

Agreed, browser technology. Lynx did this in the early 90s before a browser was even available for the web.

[whoisgregg]

Lynx did this in the early 90s

They didn't do what I'm talking about, they did what BigUns thought I was reporting.

But at this point, I can't tell if anyone (other than martinibuster) has a clue of what I'm actually talking about... so I'll just shut up and move on. If someday, someone actually goes and sees the javascript based feature that yahoo has and MSN just added which I described above and wants to confirm that I'm not insane, feel free to sticky me. :)

[bmcgee]

It's still basic browser functionality, with some javascript thrown in. When you tab through a page, it moves the focus between hyperlinks. The js simply uses the focus event to do a little bit of fancy screen updating, as if the user actually clicked on that link.

Very similar in nature to the old days where people would make the font color/size different when you hovered over a link.