We show a focus ring today when focused via F6, the "accessibility focus" key.   My primary question is if you intend to expand this to other types of focusing, since I don't think ctrl-L and mouse-click focus should behave differently from each other in this regard.

In general, I'd like to understand the philosophy of how F6 vs. other focus-change methods should differ from an a11y perspective, because we'll have similar questions for things like "should toolbar buttons show a focus ring in any state" (they don't even for F6 AFAICT).

Thanks pkasting@ for the clarification and the questions. 
With the current F6 behavior, this is a task for UX and Accessibility to refine/redefine focus navigation behaviors and indicator visuals.

Note to hwi@ and lpalmaro@: on Chromebooks, F6 becomes unavailable. Need to consider such setting to resolve this. 

Correction on c#3: F6 equivalent on cros is Search + 6. 

The reason F6 draws a focus ring now is because it then lets you Tab to focus other things in the toolbar. In Windows apps, F6 generally moves focus to different "panes" of the same Window. It was a compromise to provide a way to get full keyboard access to toolbars while still being consistent with other browsers that use F6 to move focus to the location bar in particular.

Note that other browsers let you just tab to everything in the toolbar already. We don't do that in Chrome because it's a lot of tabbing to get to the document.

I propose that we do one of two things:

1. Simplify things by allowing users to focus anything in the toolbars just by pressing Tab.
2. Or, stick with the current behavior but refine the visuals. Maybe when you press F6 the whole toolbar should get some sort of focus ring, with the cursor going in the location bar. Somehow make it more intuitive what's happening when you press F6.

On Chrome OS, the equivalent is actually Ctrl+Back/Forward (Ctrl+F1/F2) to move focus to different panes.

Awaiting hwi@ for refining/redefining focus navigation behaviors and indicator visuals.

Hwi@, friendly ping! 

re: c#5 - Thanks dmazzoni@ for context and recommendations. 

The option #1 makes sense to me 
i.e. 
- focusing on the omnibox by Ctrl+L draws the outline focusring that's same as what F6 draws
- making other elements on the toolbar focusable afterwards by Tab key (when suggestions are closed)
- but trapping the focus within the suggestions when suggestions are shown/open 

It would be helpful to understand any risks of doing so. 

I don't see anything would break with this approach, but, I could be wrong. 

The suggested 'outline' focusring treatment on the omnibox similarly matches the focusring of other text input boxes. 

Setting to p2 since this was found during our assessment

This issue has been Available for over a year. If it's no longer important or seems unlikely to be fixed, please consider closing it out. If it is important, please re-triage the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience if the bug really should have been left as Available.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

tommycli@, I'm not sure how focus rings are supposed to work these days.  You know all about them! ;-)  Can you take a look here and figure out if there's something to be done here anymore?