Why Ctrl+Tab stops working when opening a flash embedded page?

Question

This a huge pet peeve I have. Everytime I watch a video in youtube.com or megavideo.com, I can't just Ctrl+Tab to change tabs. I'll have to clic in some portion of the page without video to get it to work, but even that, isn't always the case.

Answer 1

The flash player takes over the Tab keybinding when it has focus. If the flash player inside Firefox has focus, when you press Ctrl+Tab, Firefox just sees the Ctrl keypress because flash ignores the fact that Ctrl is being held down and intercepts the Tab keypress.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a solution to this problem yet.

Answer 2

The trick is to bring the focus of the keyboard away from the Flash and back to the browser:

1. Click on the page background (outside the Flash area)
2. Now Ctrl+Tab works!

Dan's reasoning is correct: when the Flash app has the focus (for instance because you clicked its Play button) then your key presses go to the Flash app (useful if it's a game) and not to the browser.

By clicking outside the Flash app, you put the focus back to the browser, so the browser will interpret your key presses again. This is not limited to Ctrl+Tab but to any normal keypresses (meaning that the Winkey or Ctrl+Alt+Delare still handled by Windows as you'd expect, but that's because these keys aren't intended at the browser in the first place).

Answer 3

If you hit alt-tab then alt-tab again to get back to the same window the player loses focus. I use the keyboard more than the mouse though.