Microsoft has been granted a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on a process known as tabbing through a Web page in order to find links

Microsoft has been granted a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on a process known as tabbing through a Web page in order to find links. Although the patent award has raised the ire of some in the open source browser community, the implications for the widely used technique are unclear. The patent (number 6,785,865) is officially titled "Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs." Microsoft filed for the patent in March of 1997. It covers the process of shifting between links on a Web page using the computer's tab button. According to the U.S. Patent office, a "user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document." The abstract also said a user may also tab to a link that is actually a placeholder for an image "in order to make a decision whether the image should be downloaded or not." Virtually all modern Web browsers, including Microsoft's own Internet Explorer and alternative browsers like KDE's Konqueror, Apple's Safari, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and the console browser Lynx, allow for tabbing between links on a page.