Most people can safely ignore this post for fear of melting your brains. It’s only here to help people who stumble across the same problem I did, and go googling for the terms I’ve put in the post title.

For a while now Gecko has supported a non-standard CSS extension called “-moz-user-focus“. The main use of this (at least in my code) seemed to be to prevent particular XUL elements from being focusable by setting it to “ignore”.

When I recently upgraded to Firefox 3.6 I found that the focus handler in my XBL widgets was no longer getting called – with the result that I couldn’t even focus them using $(“objectName”).focus() in Firebug. It would appear that the default state for XBL-bound elements has changed from focusable to non-focusable.

The fix for this is simply to add “-moz-user-focus: normal” to the CSS styling of your XBL-bound element. It works whether added directly to a style attribute or in a referenced CSS file. With this in place my focus handler now fires as it used to, and the software works as expected once again.