Chrome Extension - first link is auto-focused in popup

Question

How do I stop my Google Chrome extension\'s default action to auto-focus the first link in my popup.html? I know I could probably do some roundabout hack with JS o

Answer 1

Perhaps auto-focus was intended for a convenience, but often it does a disservice. Since I see no way to stop the root cause, I found some roundabouts. One is using JavaScript. Chrome puts auto-focus after a short delay after displaying the popup. It's possible to unfocus it with blur() but unfocusing it too late will flash it momentarily, and trying to unfocus too early will do nothing. So to find the right time to unfocus is not easy, and this solution tries to do this several times during the first second after the popup is displayed:

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {
  var blurTimerId = window.setInterval(function() {
    if (document.activeElement != document.body) {
      document.activeElement.blur();
    }
  }, 200);
  window.setTimeout(function() {
    window.clearInterval(blurTimerId);
  }, 1000);
});

Another pure HTML solution is to add tabindex="1" to the body tag.