Friday, June 13, 2008

An interesting 'accesskey's quirk

Since I learned about accesskey support in HTML, I've been including them where appropriate in my web applications to speed up my access and usage of said applications. However, when trying to use the accesskey for a password field, P, I ran across an interesting quirk. The accesskey modifier is different for various browsers. In order to use access keys in IE, the modifier is Alt, for Firefox it's Alt+Shift, for Opera you press Shift+Esc, then the accesskey. I primarily use Firefox (go open source), so when I pressed Alt+Shift+P to access a password field, it opened Windows Media Player. As it turns out, this is the hotkey for accessing WMP from the toolbar (ie the miniplayer). To prevent this hotkey combination from opening WMP, you'll have to disable the toolbar by going to the taskbar, Right-Click -> Toolbars and uncheck Windows Media Player (I don't like the mini-player toolbar that much anyway).

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