I came across a very strange behaviour on Chrome which seems like a bug to me: when you click a link, the link does not receive the focus. Worse, the body takes the focus instead.

This behaviour can be observed here: / (see code sample here)

Is this a bug? Is this standard behaviour? Is there any workaround to make the links receive the focus on mouse down, like on the other browsers?

I came across a very strange behaviour on Chrome which seems like a bug to me: when you click a link, the link does not receive the focus. Worse, the body takes the focus instead.

This behaviour can be observed here: http://jsfiddle/YfbR7/4/ (see code sample here)

Is this a bug? Is this standard behaviour? Is there any workaround to make the links receive the focus on mouse down, like on the other browsers?

• javascript
• google-chrome
• focus

• The same behaviour also applies to checkboxes, see question here: stackoverflow./questions/18400190/… – Gyum Fox Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 10:11

3 Answers 3

Add tab index to anchor tag it should work, it's not a bug its a web kit thingy.

<a href="#" tabindex="1">Click me</a>

A link should always natively receive focus. If your link does not have a href attribute it won't (not sure the use case of a link without a href though!).

In addition to the accepted answer:

Since setting tabindex to 1 would change the TAB behavior, I remend setting it to -1 instead: it won't break the TAB navigation and will still enable it from being focused.

<a href="#" tabindex="-1">Example</a>

By the way, here's a very nice article regarding these concerns.

_{Note: the same thing happened with me, but just on Safari: probably Chrome has already that issue fixed.}