Happy focus

Make Chrome and IE responsibly lose focus when the user is clicking inputs

Once you style buttons or inputs away from their defaults, the :focus state and its styles will show and retain on click in all recent Chrome versions or IE >= 9. In IE9 specifically, default :focus styles even show when not applying custom styles. And then your designer will complain about this. 😉

Solution

Happy focus! 😎

A small script that responsibly removes focus after a click.

GitHub | NPM | @jelmerdemaat

Try here: jelmerdemaat.github.io/happy-focus. In the first example the red border (or any other style you give it) is visible in said browsers on click as well as when using the keyboard to navigate. In the second example, this behaviour is responsibly fixed:

1. Detect if the event was solely a click, or a keydown followed by a click
2. If the event is a single click
3. Wait one requestAnimationFrame, needed to correctly blur() in Chrome
4. blur() the currently clicked element

Install

Directly

Include happyfocus(.min).js somewhere in your document, before the rest of your JavaScript where you initiate this script.

Via npm

npm install --save happy-focus

Usage

In your JavaScript:

// When using an npm based build process, import the module:
import HappyFocus from 'happy-focus';
 
// Create an instance of HappyFocus
const happyfocus = new HappyFocus();
 
// Optionally, pass a querySelectorAll string
// or array of querySelectorAll strings.
// Defaults to:
//   'input[type="radio"], input[type="checkbox"], button:not([type="submit"])';
 
const customhappyfocus = new HappyFocus([
  'input[type="checkbox"]',
  'button'
]);
 
// Done!

Accessibility

When using the keyboard, all normal focussing and blurring functionality is retained. Yeay for keyboard users! ❤️

It is advised not the use this script on type="submit" inputs or buttons, as it breaks native form validation.

Browser support

This little script (888B minified, 416B gzipped) is supported in all browsers that support Element.matches() (either prefixed or not) and requestAnimationFrame. Which is a lot: caniuse.com/#feat=matchesselector,queryselector

Can I Use screenshots:

matches()

requestAnimationFrame()