343642 - document.activeElement wrongly gives BODY in background tabs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Peter Kasting]

This is follow-on to bug 337631 comment 8 and bug 337631 comment 14.

Due to the focus architecture in Gecko, background tabs don't really have an "active element".  This information actually gets saved inside browser.xml, which the Gecko core code shouldn't be depending on.  Therefore document.activeElement wrongly returns the BODY in background tabs.

To fix this, we need to rework focus entirely, so this isn't going to happen any time soon.  I didn't find a bug about that already (though I know it's been discussed previously).  If there is one, this should depend on that.

See also bug 307933.

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Neil, was this issue incorporated into your focus handling re-work?

Comment 2

[Neil Deakin]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Neil, was this issue incorporated into your focus handling re-work?

activeElement returns what is currently focused if the tab is active or what would be focused (in other words what was last focused) if the tab is not active.

So in that sense this bug was fixed. It's not clear from the comment above though that the result for background tabs is expected to be 'what would be focused' or 'null'. I think what is currently implemented is more useful.

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Means we can close this bug?

Comment 4

[Peter Kasting]

The desired behavior is for background tabs to be treated identically to foreground tabs.  Therefore, the current behavior (as described in comment 2) is correct and this bug is Fixed.

BTW, thanks Neil for the reworking of focus handling.  What a nightmare.

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

So I think fixed by bug 178324? Marking so.