ghacks Technology News

Disable Text Field Auto Focus

greasemonkeyWe 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

Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.

Related Articles:

Automatically Jump To First Text Field
Quick Jump To Text Fields In Firefox
Focus Keyboard, Activate UrlBar, Forms On KeyPress In Firefox
Focus Keyboard Improves Your Firefox Workflow
Cycle Input Focus, Activate Forms In Firefox With A Shortcut



About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Tuesday April 14, 2009 -
Tags:, , , , ,


Responses so far:

  1. Undead says:

    Thanks, works perfectly

  2. harry says:

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

  3. dhr says:

    Where can I find Focus Killer? I looked on http://userscripts.org/

  4. me says:

    So, where the hell is the script????????????

Leave a Reply   Follow Ghacks   Subscribe To Comment Rss

Subscribe without commenting

© 2005-2012 Ghacks.net. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - About Us