Troubleshooting Mozilla 1.2.1 part 3: Using Kensington, Macally input devices; tabbed navigation tip

Kensington/ Input Using USB Overdrive, a universal USB driver that handles all USB mice and trackballs from any manufacturer and lets you configure them either globally or on an application-specific basis, seems to be the solution for users experiencing problems with Kensington and Macally input devices under Mac OS 9.2.2 in Mozilla, Netscape or Chimera.

Don Handley writes:

"I had the scrolling poroblem in Netscape 7 using a Kensington scroll wheel mouse under OS 9.2 using the Kensington drivers. I bought USB Overdrive after finding that the scroll wheel works normally in the same environment. The only functionality lost is the 'snap to default button' feature in the Kensington software."

Meanwhile, Macally devices are also displaying odd behavior under the Mozilla/Fizzilla-based browsers. Joe Streno writes:

"I am using a MacAlly iOpti Jr Mouse with Mozilla (Mac OS X), and am experiencing problems when after a mouse click Mozilla thinks I still have the mouse down. This is the only program it happens in. It could be an incompatibility with the MacAlly mouse driver and Mozilla or just another Mozilla oddity."

Download USB Overdrive [981k]

Tabbed navigation MacFixIt reader Marc offers a tip for getting tabbed link cycling to work in Mozilla 1.2.1:

"Ever since updating to Mozilla 1.2, I've been very frustrated to find that pressing the tab key to cycle focus between all links and form elements had stopped working. After the update, tab only cycled focus between form text fields. Today I finally figured out how to fix this problem. Add this line to your user.js file: user_pref("accessibility.tabfocus", 7);

"For those who don't know, user.js is a file where you can manually add your own customized preference settings. You create the file in your profile folder, which is ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/default/RANDOM.slt (where RANDOM is some random string of characters).

Another nice preference to add for v1.2 is this one: user_pref("ui.textSelectBackgroundAttention", "#E75CDC"); where #E75CDC is a hexadecimal value for the colour that you would like text highlighting to be when you use the type-ahead feature (change #E75CDC to whatever colour you want).

Feedback on this issue? Drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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