Posted by mattw on 02.23.10 to 411. Subscribe to follow comments on this post. 2 comments. Add your thoughts or trackback from your own site.

Microsoft has a proud tradition of fixing IE bugs in its successor version. Unfortunately, there is an equally rich tradition of introducing irrational, basic bugs as well. There is a bad, bad bug in IE8 that I spent many an hour researching to no avail, so I thought I'd post the solution here.

Under certain circumstances, you will not be able to "tab through a form" -- ie. use the tab key to go from one form element to the next, standard-issue behavior in the rational (non-IE) browsers. I had a standard form that when tabbed through, would start selecting images on the page, etc. in a seemingly random way.

The solution is to use the HTML tabindex property, to ensure that IE tabs in the correct order.

 
<form>
<input type="text" name="meeting[name]" tabindex="1">
<input type="text" name="meeting[attendees]" tabindex="2">
<input type="text" name="meeting[location]" tabindex="3">
<input type="submit" name="submit" tabindex="4">
</form>
 

As a side note, I fail to understand how so much product goes out the door at Microsoft without any QA to speak of.

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