Disable Text Field Auto Focus

We would like to show how to disable the auto focus on text fields of selected websites to complete the series of posts that deal with auto focusing on text fields once the website opens in the web browser. If you open the Google Search homepage by default you notice that the cursor will automatically be placed in the search form on that page. Many users like this feature as it speeds up their search. Not by much but it adds up over the days.

Some users on the other hand prefer that this is not happening automatically. This is probably not so much a problem of Google Search but on pages with several text fields that auto focus on the first once the page has loaded. Users who start typing in data in the first text field – and probably jump to the second to continue – will notice that the cursor will be placed in the first text field once the page has finished loading no matter where it is currently located on the page. Not that nice if you started typing in a long secure password only to realize that you have to type it in again.

Focus Killer is another Greasemonkey script that can disable auto focus on text fields. The default setting of the script is to enable this option for all websites. This does cause problems with some websites though and it is recommended to specify the websites it should work on. This can be done easily by right-clicking the Greasemonkey icon in the web browser, selecting Manage User Scripts from the menu, removing the * entry in the Included Pages table and adding new websites by clicking on the Add button next to it.

Check out the other article in the series if you want the reverse effect. (read: Automatically jump to first text field

Tags: auto focus, disable auto focus, firefox, greasemonkey, userscript, web browser
Categories: Browsing, firefox

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4. Custom Prefix and Suffix Auto-Complete In Firefox
5. Automatically Reload Websites With Auto F5
6. Spice Up Google Search With Google Fx
7. Megaupload Captcha Auto Fill
8. Show 100 Search Results in Google per page

4 Responses to “Disable Text Field Auto Focus”

1. Undead says:

   April 14, 2009 at 3:27 pm

   Thanks, works perfectly

   Reply
2. harry says:

   July 24, 2009 at 9:01 pm

   This looks good but it doesn’t work. I needed it for istockphoto.com (the search function) – this has no effect there.

   Reply