Tab Navigation with Select2 dropdowns in CEP Panel (Illustrator 2026)

Hi Adobe Community,

I'm developing a CEP extension for Illustrator 2026 and running into an issue with keyboard tab navigation when using the Select2 jQuery plugin for dropdown menus.

Environment:

• Adobe Illustrator 2026 (version 30.0)
• CEP panel using Select2 4.0.x for enhanced dropdowns
• Standard text inputs work fine with tab navigation

The Issue: Tab key navigation works correctly for standard input type="text" fields, but completely skips over Select2 dropdowns, even when I explicitly set tabindex attributes on the Select2-generated .select2-selection elements.

What I've Tried:

1. Setting tabindex in HTML on the original select elements before Select2 initialization
2. Passing tabindex parameter in Select2 configuration options
3. Setting tabindex on .select2-selection elements after Select2 initialization using setTimeout() to ensure DOM is fully rendered
4. Targeting various Select2-generated elements (.select2-container, .select2-selection, .select2-search__field)

Observation: This same code works perfectly in modern browsers (Chrome, Edge) when testing outside of Illustrator, but fails within the CEP environment.

Question: Is this a known limitation of the CEP browser engine? Since CEP uses an older Chromium Embedded Framework (possibly CEF v61-74 range), does it simply not support tab navigation through dynamically-generated custom form controls like Select2?

Has anyone successfully implemented tab navigation with Select2 or similar custom dropdown libraries in a CEP panel? Or should I accept that tab navigation only works with native HTML form controls in CEP and consider switching to native select elements?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated!