[whatwg] Should scrollbars move focus?

Elliott Sprehn esprehn at gmail.com
Fri Oct 19 15:34:42 PDT 2012


I was working on a bug [1][2] recently where authors had complained
about WebKit's behavior where clicking a scrollbar unfocuses the
activeElement. What's particularly quirky is that the window scrollbar
never moves focus in any browser I tried, but overflow scrollbars
inside the page *do* move focus in WebKit, IE and Opera but not in
Gecko.

This behavior seems unfortunate because it means scrolling a form
inside an overflow div moves focus from where you were typing and it's
also really weird that window scrollbars are special.

What's the correct behavior here? It would be best if all the browsers
could be consistent, but I'm not sure the existing common behavior is
best. :)

[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96335
[2] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=51469

- Elliott


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