Disable focusing address bar and move focus to the document body
I've set my startup page and the new tabs page to a blank page. By default, when I first open a new Firefox window or a new tab the focus is in the address bar. I want to change this focus to the main document body instead of the address bar both times (when I first startup Firefox or when I open a new tab with Ctrl+T. Is there a preference I can add/modify in about:config to achieve this without any add-ons whatsoever.
I am using Firefox version 96.0.2.
If sadly such feature does not exist, I would like to request the developers of Firefox to add such a feature on its next release.
All Replies (7)
With a new tab, the focus always is placed in the address bar. There is no built-in setting to change that.
With the home page in a new window, the focus is placed in the body. However, the "blank page" option. I don't think "blank page" really has a document body in the traditional sense (if you call up its source using Ctrl+U there's nothing there).
That said, if you press the F6 key (at least on Windows), you can see that the focus moves to the blank page, so it's theoretically possible.
Mozilla opened a new "Ideas" site to gather feature suggestions. Or you could file a bug report.
Neither of those sites uses Firefox Account login at the moment, I don't think.
By the way, is there a particular reason you do not want the focus in the address bar? If the problem is how the address bar behaves, perhaps there is a remedy for that now.
jscher2000 said
By the way, is there a particular reason you do not want the focus in the address bar? If the problem is how the address bar behaves, perhaps there is a remedy for that now.
No, it is not because how the address bar behaves. I am using an add-on called `vim-vixen` to handle creating and switching tabs but the bindings for that add-on can only be invoked from the document body. So when the address bar is focused, especially on startup, those bindings do not work.
I guess I'll have to file for a feature request for now. Thank you for your help!
Maybe the add-on author can create a custom "blank" new tab page option to work around this issue? https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/chrome_url_overrides
Hi! So setting the startup page to a custom url sort of solves my problem. I created a local HTML file with nothing in it and it solves my original issue (at least when Firefox first starts up). But I noticed a half of a second of a lag compared to setting to it just to a blank page. Is there a way I could possibly speed things up even if not by much. Thank you!
I'm not aware of a way to shorten the time to load the home page. As a person who always restores the previous session at startup, I'm used to waiting much longer than that.
Perhaps a few seconds is normal then. I'll have to settle with it. Thank you so much for your time sir.