Do users a favor and set the keyboard focus.

Don't think you're doing keyboarders a favor if you do this on any page with a scrollbar. Us keyboarders like the Page Up / Page Down keys to work.

I do this on the ourdoings.com login page, but not as a matter of course.

I'd murder someone if they made the search box in Google Reader grab keyboard focus. Keyboard shortcuts are way more important, and '/' focuses the search there, anyway.

do users a favor and DON'T steal the keyboard focus

http://reddit.com/info/628t3/comments/

Only if it's really really really what every user that would EVER use the web page will want.

I would actually like it if IMDB put focus in their search box, when I'm looking up a director of photography or such, I'm just impatience and would like to go, type, enter, read. The extra click to type is annoying. But I still don't know if they should actually implement that as I have not done a real analysis of how the broad community uses the site.

The second I saw this title I started thinking the same things as all these comments are listing.

Maybe someone should write this up as a context-menu addition for Firefox. Just put it under "Add a Keyword for this Search..." Use something like "Set keyboard focus on load..."