$.focus() not working

Found a solution elsewhere on the net...

$('#id').focus();

did not work.

$('#id').get(0).focus();

did work.

Actually the example you gave for focusing on this site works just fine, as long as you're not focused in the console. The reason that's not working is simply because it's not stealing focus from the dev console. If you run the following code in your console and then quickly click in your browser window after, you will see it focus the search box:

setTimeout(function() { $('input[name="q"]').focus() }, 3000);

As for your other one, the one thing that has given me trouble in the past is order of events. You cannot call focus() on an element that hasn't been attached to the DOM. Has the element you are trying to focus already been attached to the DOM?