[Tip] How to Use or Disable Keyboard Navigation Support for Toolbar in Mozilla Firefox

New versions of Mozilla Firefox web browser come with built-in keyboard navigation support for toolbar functions. Now you can access various buttons present on the browser toolbar by pressing keys on your keyboard. There is no need to use your mouse to click on toolbar buttons. Users who heavily use keyboard to navigate and select stuffs in their computers, can now navigate between toolbar buttons and menus using their keyboard.

Mozilla team has improved keyboard accessibility in the newer versions of Firefox browser. Now toolbar and overflow menu both can be fully accessed using keyboard. You can now use keyboard to access add-ons, downloads panel, overflow, page actions and Firefox menus. Now almost everything in Firefox is fully keyboard accessible.

How to Use Keyboard to Access Toolbar Buttons and Functions in Mozilla Firefox?

First of all you need to press Ctrl+L keys together to move focus to the address bar. You can also press F6 or Alt+D keys to move to address bar.

Now to start navigating between toolbar buttons, press Tab key. It’ll start going through all toolbar buttons including address bar icons (such as page actions, pocket, bookmark) and main Firefox Menu (hamburger menu).

When you press Tab key, Firefox moves the focus to toolbar buttons groups. Once the focus is present in your desired button group, you can press Left or Right Arrow keys to move through the selected button group.

If you want to navigate between toolbar buttons groups backward (left-side), you can press SHIFT+Tab keys.

When you want to activate i.e. click on a desired toolbar button, press Space or Enter key.

If you want to access the right-click menu (context menu) of a toolbar button, you can press Shift+F10 keys together.

How to Disable Toolbar Keyboard Navigation Support in Mozilla Firefox?

Although keyboard navigation support for toolbar is a good addition to Firefox but there might be some people who may not like the feature. Some people may want to navigate using keyboard inside the web page only and switching between toolbar buttons first before accessing a webpage using keyboard may annoy them.

Fortunately Firefox comes with a built-in preference/flag to deactivate and disable keyboard navigation support for toolbar. You can permanently turn off new keyboard support in toolbar in Firefox.

Following steps will help you in disabling toolbar buttons access using keyboard in Firefox:

1. Open Mozilla Firefox and type about:config in the addressbar and press Enter. It’ll show you a warning message, click on “I accept the risk!” button. It’ll open Firefox’s hidden secret advanced configuration page i.e. about:config page.

2. Now type keyboard_nav in Search filter box and it’ll show following preference in the window:

The preference value is set to true by default, which means keyboard support for toolbar is enabled in Firefox browser.

3. To completely deactivate and disable keyboard navigation support for toolbar in Firefox, double-click on browser.toolbars.keyboard_navigation preference and set it to false. Alternatively, you can right-click on the preference and select Toggle option.

That’s it. Restart Firefox and now you’ll not be able to access toolbar buttons using keyboard.

PS: In future, if you decide to re-enable this feature in Firefox, set the value of above mentioned preference to true again.