I have a contenteditable div which needs to be focussed at pageload (place cursor at the first line).
document.getElementById(\"editor\").focus()
works
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 :)