But there are other sites where you might want to jump to a form on, for instance on your favorite tech blog after reading the article there to leave a comment in the comment form.

The tab key would feel natural as it is used in many desktop applications for that task, but web browsers use it to cycle through page elements.

Firefox users can install an extension like Cycle Input Focus or Fox Input for the task. The former supports the majority of forms on a website, while the latter only supports input fields (that is single line forms). Users who want comment forms supported therefor need to install the Cycle Input Focus extension.

The shortcuts Ctrl-Alt-x and Ctrl-Alt-c are used to activate the next or the previous form field on the web page. For Fox Input, it is the shortcut Alt-i that puts the cursor into the next form. Users who are not comfortable working with those shortcuts can do the following. Fox Input comes with a single setting to change the keyboard shortcut natively. Cycle Input Focus on the other hand does not. The suggested Keyconfig extension for Firefox is still working despite its age and absence at the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

You may need to force compatibility to get the keyboard shortcut configuration utility working in your version of Firefox. Select the shortcut and press a new keyboard combination to set it. The new shortcut becomes immediately available after a click on the Apply button.

Textarea Cache for Firefox is an add-on that takes care of that problem once and for all. It saves text typed into Firefox regularly, so that it can be recovered, even if the tab or the browser crashes.

The add-on places an icon in the Firefox status bar when it saves text in the cache. The icon displays a new window with saved texts on left-click, and a context menu with options on right-click.

The last text that has been saved by the add-on is displayed by default, with a pulldown menu on top to open older texts.

textarea cache

Text can be easily copied by clicking on the copy and close button, or using the traditional Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C or Right-click and copy options.

Other options include removing the selected item from the saved text listing, and emptying the cache which removes all textual information that have been saved by the add-on.

Some users may want to know which texts are saved automatically, and which are not. The name of the extension hints at that, but only web developers and webmasters understand it. Textarea is basically any text field with multiple rows. That’s not the most accurate description but it should do for the purpose of this review. A blog comment form, blog posting, forum posting or Twitter message will be saved automatically, while website addresses entered in the browser address bar, or web searches will not.

Some users may want to prevent the saving of texts on specific sites. This is done by adding those sites to the exclusion list. The right-click context menu and the add-on’s options provide that functionality.

save text comments

Text entered in private browsing mode will be ignored by the add-on by default. This can be changed in the options as well.

Textarea Cache can be a lifesaver, especially for users who have experienced crashes in the past that resulted in losing text that had been entered previously in a web form. The add-on is compatible with all Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 browser versions.

Back in 2008 we reviewed a Firefox add-on called Text Area Resizer & Mover which did a great job of resizing textareas. Not only the ones that were to small but also the ones that were to big. It was even possible to move the textarea but this often caused problems with the site layout.

Textarea++ is a new experimental add-on for the Firefox web browser that offers a similar functionality except for moving textareas on the screen. It has a few aces up its sleeve though making it interesting enough to justify a review. Textareas can be resized by simply moving the mouse cursor to the lower right corner. The textarea can then be increased or decreased in size. The developer claims that it works with all textareas even those that are loaded dynamically and we have not found a textarea during our tests that would make that claim invalid.

Another interesting option is the addition of a scrollbar for textareas where more text than the visible limit can handle has been entered. This scrollbar is added even if scrollbar functionality has been locked by the webmaster.

Textarea++ is an interesting add-on for users who regularly post on websites that offer an improper textarea for that task. Users who prefer a bookmarklet find the Form Text Resizer bookmarklet at The Man In Blue page. And there are also quite a few userscripts, for example that by Julien Couvreur that provide a similar functionality.

Update: Textarea++ has been discontinued. Firefox users can instead install the Resizable Textarea add-on.

It is not that useful for me but if you do have to fill out lots of web forms you might find this extension handy. What it does is that it adds an edit button in the lower right corner of every textarea web form. If you click that edit button you are taken directly to your default text editor and use it to write the text that should be send in that web form.

The major advantage is that you can use your editor to do the formatting of the text and see exactly how it looks like without having to use bbcode or html code to format the text in the textbox itself. Very useful in situations that require a good professional layout.