User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.2 Build ID: 20110902133214 Steps to reproduce: When focus is set for the first time on a check box, radio button or combo box through JavaScript in new versions of Firefox (I tested Firefox 6), there is no visual indication that the element now has focus. This only seems to happen on winXP. It works correctly in Firefox 3.6 on winXP and in all versions of Firefox on Windows 7. A reproducible test case is attached. Just load the html page in Firefox 6 on winXP and click the 'Focus CheckBox 1' button. Actual results: When the 'Focus CheckBox 1' button is clicked, focus is placed on the first checkbox, however no visual indication that this checkbox now has focus is provided. If you press the space bar, you can check and uncheck the field so the checkbox does actually have focus though. If you tab to another input field on the page and then click the 'Focus CheckBox 1' button again, checkbox 1 now gets visual focus. This also happens for radio buttons and combo boxes which are also included in the attached sample. This is an accessibility concern since users will have no visual indication where the focus is for these HTML elements. Expected results: Clicking the 'Focus CheckBox 1' button should move focus to the first checkbox on the page and there should be a visual indication that this checkbox now has focus.

Is this a theming issue? Sounds like it.

Likely the effect of bug 418521.

Isn't this the opposite of bug 418521? IE9 does the same thing as Firefox6. Except, when the keyboard is used to focus something once, then the focus ring will appear always, while focusing something in IE9, even in separate sessions.

> Isn't this the opposite of bug 418521? Right. The point is that the behavior observed is quite purposeful, and was introduced in bug 418521. It's the OS-default focus behavior on Windows. Presumably users for whom it's an accessibility concern have their windows settings set accordingly, and we do follow those here last I checked.

bug 418521 deals more with the case where the user mouse-clicks an element to give it focus. Removing the focus ring makes sense in this case since the user has explicitly selected the element and therefore knows exactly where the focus is. Giving an element focus using the JavaScript .focus() call is very different though because users have no way of knowing when this is called or where the focus is. Some comments in bug 418521 also express this point - see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418521#c28 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418521#c57. It is interesting that it is only the first call to .focus() that does not give a visual indication of where the focus is. Subsequent .focus() calls do display the focus ring.

Any update on this? A major usability issue for our keyboard only users

This bug has was associated with bug 720352, which I have regressed and confirmed is working. Regression for this issue: Focus > Radio/Check-box/Drop-down/Buttons: for mouse or keyboard usage; color and outline visual representation Version 45.0.1 Build ID 20160315153207 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0 Version 48.0a1 Build ID 20160405030214 Considering this I will mark this issue as Resolved-WORKSFORME. If anyone can still reproduce it, feel free to reopen the issue and provide any needed updates.