jQuery Forum

It's not a bug. With a show option of fade (or anything) the display of the dialog becomes asynchronous and happens after the rest of your code runs. So you request the dialog to open, you set the focus to password, the dialog opens, and sets the focus to the first field. You need to add a delay to the focus call, since there isn't a handy event after the dialog is fully shown. Something like this (adjust the timing as necessary):

1. $('#dialog-form').dialog({
2.       autoOpen: false,
3.       title: 'Title',
4.       height: 300,
5.       width: 350,
6.       modal: true,
7.       show: 'fade',
8.       hide: 'fade',
9.       open: function() {
10.             setTimeout(function() {
11.                   $('#password').focus();
12.             }, 420); // After 420 ms
    
13.       },
14.       close: function() {
15.             $(this).dialog('close');
16.       }
17. });
18.          
19. $('#showDialog-button').on('click', function() {
20.       $('#dialog-form').dialog('open');
21. });

You could raise a ticket suggesting the team add a post-open callback that you could use for this requirement.

You can place an autofocus attribute on the element you want to have focused on open.

Autofocus attribut on input tag working fine with jsfiddle  -> http://jsfiddle.net/bh9nK/