focus doesn’t work in IE

For IE you need to use a settimeout function due to it being lazy, for example:

setTimeout(function() { document.getElementById('myInput').focus(); }, 10);

From http://www.mkyong.com/javascript/focus-is-not-working-in-ie-solution/

For opera, this may help:
how to set focus in required index on textbox for opera

UPDATE:

The following snippet of code handles the case when the element is unavailable and retries after a short period – perfect for slow loading pages and/or elements not available until some time after.

setTimeout(

function( ) {

    var el = document.getElementById( "myInput" ) ;
    ( el != null ) ? el.focus( ) : setTimeout( arguments.callee , 10 ) ;

}

, 10 ) ;