Similarly, if using VoiceOver, this is a strange experience. If I use VoiceOver to navigate to the search field in the page, I can access the "search or type url" text, but that wording makes me think that it's an editable text field. However, I can't actually type into that field - I can't get there just using the keyboard with voiceover. The only way to do a search is to press Ctrl + L to put my cursor up in the omnibox, or press Ctrl + T to open another new tab, and have my focus go to the omnibox by default. It's a very confusing experience if you try to use VoiceOver and the keyboard to navigate through the page and do the typed search that way. 

FWIW, this is not a Mac-only bug, and it's going to be non-trivial. This has been a source of frustration for years, ever since the 1993 launch.

Happy to re-open this longstanding bug but we should probably figure out who's the current owner of the NTP and try to figure out the path forward.

Looking at this in-product, I wonder why we are skipping the fakebox in the tab order. 

If you click on the fakebox, focus is *not* immediately put on the omnibox. Instead, the fakebox gets focus and a blinking caret. Only once you start typing focus is transferred to the omnibox.

I think we should do the same as part of the tab order: Once tabbing takes you to the fakebox, the fakebox gets the usual blue highlight and blinking caret.

Marc, is this something you can take on? We should send this as a proposal to UI review to make sure we are not missing implications from the previous discussions Dominic referred to.

The fakebox is weird. As the name implies, it's not actually a text box; it's just designed to look like one.

We do explicitly set its tabIndex="-1" and aria-hidden="true", but I couldn't find any justification for that. I can explore changing it, but as this has been around since the original 1993 launch, I expect it won't be easy to change.

As this has been around since ~forever, I challenge that it's actually a P1.

My proposal would be to fix this after the remote NTP is gone (see go/ntp-refactor).

cross-reference: crbug.com/778489