Mac OS X Browsers and Shortcut Keys
Since switching to the new macbook last month, I’ve loved getting to know Safari and Camino. Safari has the insane speed going for it, and Camino has the power of the Gecko engine with MacOS style. Lately I’ve been using Firefox for all first-iteration development work and Safari for all general browsing. Camino has a backup role since I’ve noticed its slowness compared to Safari and its lack of dev tools.
However, one huge annoyance is the different shortcut keys. For example:
View Source: Camino: Cmd+Alt+V Firefox: Cmd+U Safari: Cmd+Alt+U
Focus on Search Box Camino: Cmd+Shift+F Firefox: Cmd+K Safari: Cmd+Alt+F
Switch Between Tabs Camino: Cmd+Option+Left/Right Arrow Firefox: Cmd+Option+Tab Safari: Cmd+Shift+Left/Right Arrow
Then throw in the mix FF on windows, which uses Ctrl instead of Cmd, and you have a complete mess. I realize that you can change all these keys and probably get them consistent, but it should not be that hard. Could the vendors pick one standard and just follow it - at least the non-IE vendors? My pick would be follow Firefox’s keys, only because it has the largest market share and would help align things with users who use both platforms. I suppose thats asking for far too much cooperation and consideration for the user experience from open source. But it sure would be nice…