ContentEditable focus in Chrome/Safari
This question may no longer be relevant to the questioner but I'll answer it for future readers. The basic principle is to set the selection to a collapsed range at the start of the element.
I solved this problem by using the Rangy JS library: http://code.google.com/p/rangy
var r = rangy.createRange();r.setStart( document.getElementById('editor'), 0 );r.collapse(true);rangy.getSelection().setSingleRange(r);This might be more than is necessary but it definitely works cross-browser and Rangy provides a bunch of extra utilities as well so it's probably worth looking into :)
I was able to add focus to a DIV by calling the focus() method chained to the attr() method
$el.attr('contenteditable', "true").focus()