gHacks technology news » auto focus http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:43:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Disable Text Field Auto Focus http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/14/disable-text-field-auto-focus/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/14/disable-text-field-auto-focus/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:07:24 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/14/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

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/14/disable-text-field-auto-focus/feed/ 4 Automatically Jump To First Text Field http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/automatically-jump-to-first-text-field/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/automatically-jump-to-first-text-field/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:11:33 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/automatically-jump-to-first-text-field/ greasemonkeyWe mentioned a setting for the Firefox web browser earlier today that allowed the usage of the tab key to jump to the first text field on a website.This is handy on websites with no auto focus on the first text field. There was no apparent way, either by installing a Firefox add-on or userscript, to automate that process further by automatically focusing on the first text field on specific sites.

Research for disabling that feature on websites with enabled auto focus led to a Greasemonkey user script that would do exactly what we have been looking for earlier today: A script that would automatically jump to the first text field on selected websites without user interaction. A Greasemonkey script for that purpose is great because of the following reasons:

  • It is not limited to the Firefox web browser but can also be added to other web browser supporting Greasemonkey or those scripts.
  • It can be enabled on specific domains (or all).

A user wanting to install the script needs to download Greasemonkey or a compatible program. Once Greasemonkey or its equivalent are installed the Focus First Textbox script can be added to the web browser. The last step involves adding domain names or strings where this user script should be active on.

A right-click on the Greasemonkey icon in the status bar of Firefox and the selection of Manage User Scripts will open the configuration. Select the Focus First Textbox script from the left sidebar. A click on the Add button next to included pages will open a basic form that can be filled with a domain name.

focus first textbox

The script becomes active on newly added pages after reloading them.

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