I know we tried this before but forgot the conclusion, why don't we try to normalize it on the Button click handler (or related events).

Asking cause it's not the first time we have the button click focus issues and certainly not the last time.

I've been thinking about this as well.

I think one of the main reluctances I'd have is in breaking expectations about how elements are expected to work, but I'm not sure how well this holds up:

• The abstraction of a button shouldn't necessarily be known to be tied to expectations around a particular HTML element.
• The "expected" behavior is clearly not very expected, or at least it's highly inconsistent between browsers and consequently prone to error.

On the technical front, I've been wondering as well just how this would work:

• If we dispatch a new window.Event, how well does would it interoperate with React's event system, and in particular with portaled rendering which can't rely on DOM event bubbling?

I've also been thinking about a few other options:

• Is <input type="button"> susceptible to this as well? And if not, could we implement <Button> this way? I expect by virtue of the differences between the two (largely ability to use non-text HTML content in <button>), it may be infeasible.
• What about something like <span role="button"> ? As I understand it, there are a lot of accessibility challenges in using role="button" effectively, but if it were technically possible, we could absorb that complexity into the implementation of the core component.
• Wrap every <button> with <span tabindex="-1">, essentially applying the behavior implemented here universally. There are some known issues here (huge proliferation of wrapping elements) and some unknown issues (potential side-effects of so many additional focusable elements).

I think @diegohaz might have good thoughts on this problem as something he probably already faced with reakit

On Reakit we opted to ensure consistency across browsers on a Tabbable component (which is used by Button): https://github.com/reakit/reakit/blob/c9f55d7d87f12b58ee409e8a392a9c36c2aadf52/packages/reakit/src/Tabbable/Tabbable.ts#L141-L148

It's important to note that, on Firefox/macOS, calling preventDefault() there also prevents it to get the :active state when clicked (ariakit/ariakit#432). Something like data-active could be used instead. That's the only bad side-effect people noticed so far.

@diegohaz Thanks for sharing! It hadn't occurred to me as potentially being as simple as calling .focus() on the button node. About the implementation and your point about preventDefault: Can you explain why preventDefault is necessary at all?

That's because Safari/Firefox on macOS will blur the button if it has focus on mouse down. preventDefault prevents that from happening. But there may be another way to work around that.