WebKit doesn't match the DOM 3 spec WRT focusin/focusout events, see http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/html/DOM3-Events.html#event... . Specifically, focusin/focusout are supposed to fire before the element actually receives/loses focus. Browsers are wildly inconsistent with focus-related events, but only WebKit and IE support focusin/focusout and only WebKit gets this bit wrong. Also, there are a few things that you ought to be able to do that you can't currently: 1. Capture and handle a blur-type event before focus is moved or the selection is cleared/moved. 2. Capture and handle a focus-type event before focus is moved or the selection is cleared/moved. In WebKit, the selection and focus are cleared from the element being blurred before any events are fired. That's lametastic. One common use-case here is making keyboard-accessible UI widgets for a rich-text area. For keyboard-accessible UI widgets, especially ones that require text input (e.g. a font combo-box), you need to save the selection before blurring. Instead of simply listening to a blur event, you need to instrument every place that might clear the selection when clicked in order to save it first. I've listed below the order events are fired in different browsers when one element is blurred and another is focused. I was using roughly this code: <div contentEditable id=foo>asdf</div> <div contentEditable id=bar>qwer</div> <script> var foo = document.getElementById('foo'); var bar = document.getElementById('bar'); bar.addEventListener('DOMFocusIn', function() { console.log('focusin: ' + document.activeElement.id) }, true); bar.addEventListener('focus', function() { console.log('focus: ' + document.activeElement.id) }, true); foo.addEventListener('DOMFocusOut', function() { console.log('focusout: ' + document.activeElement.id) }, true); foo.addEventListener('blur', function() { console.log('blur: ' + document.activeElement.id) }, true); </script> Opera 10.6: blur, domfocusout, focus, domfocusin Moves activeElement immediately before firing any events. WebKit nightly: blur, (dom)focusout, focus, (dom)focusin Clears activeElement before blur/focusout, sets active element before focus/focusin FF 3.6:blur, focus Clears activeElement before blur, sets active element before focus. IE 8: focusout, focusin, blur, focus Moves activeElement immediately before firing any events. It's a bit gross, but the only solution I can think of is to fire the following events in WebKit (in this order): focusout focusin {remove focus and clear selection as appropriate} blur domfocusout {add focus to new node and set selection as appropriate} focus domfocusin I'd like to say we could get rid of DOMFocusOut/DOMFocusIn or blur/focus, but I expect too many sites would break. What do you all think? I care more about meeting the use-case listed above than matching the spec. If we can meet the above use-case differently, I expect we could get the spec modified. Ojan