window.frames[0].document.onkeydown not working in Firefox

Question

I have this line not working in Firefox (works perfectly fine in IE and Chrome)

ste.frame.document.onkeydown=function(e) {
    alert('a');
};

here ste.frame is a window object [object Window]. I tried

window.frames[0].document.onkeydown=function(e){
    alert('b');
}

Also working in IE and Chrome and not working in Firefox. I guess if the second one works, the first one will work either.

Does anyone know how to resolve this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I spended almost an hour to find a solution, but I couldn't. I think the reason is, that the Mozilla foundation has implented just the basics of IFrame object, so you can't assign an eventhandler. Compare to eventhandler you can modify css styles (see this example).

window.frames[0].document.onkeydown=function(e){ alert('b'); }

I used the DOM-Inspector to figure out on which object this code does point. In my eyes, it points to global object of DOM of Firefox.

PS: In case I'm wrong, correct me please.

Answer 2

The code you posted in the comments above doesn't work because you're setting the listener before the subframe is done loading its about:blank document. So you're setting a listener on a temporary document that then goes away.

Gecko is likely to change behavior here at some point to more closely match what you see in IE and WebKit now that the HTML5 spec actually defines how about:blank should behave....