How to prevent Flash from stealing keyboard focus in Forefox

July 7, 2008 9:53 PM

How can I prevent flash from stealing my keyboard focus in Firefox on Win XP?

I constantly use ctrl-tab and other keyboard shortcuts to flip between tabs in Firefox, and invariably some stupid flash application will steal keyboard focus, and I must use the mouse to click somewhere to regain it. Is there an add-on or other trick I can use to never let flash take certain key combinations, and only send them to Firefox? Does Greasemonkey allow this?

posted by stovenator to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

There's an item about flash in this post about other antagonistic file types.
posted by judge.mentok.the.mindtaker at 11:06 PM on July 7, 2008

It's Bug 78414, and if I read the 200+ comments correctly, it's kind of hard to fix.
posted by dhoe at 1:22 AM on July 8, 2008

Note that the bug has been open for 7 years! And although I'm sure it's hard to fix, most of the discussion seems to be about what the browser's correct behavior should be in cases like this: pass some key combos to the browser, pass them all, pass none (what it does now I think), let the flash app choose what to pass, etc.
posted by Who_Am_I at 6:18 AM on July 8, 2008