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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

This just makes me sad that windows stealing focus, grabbing a randomly typed space bar, and submitting themselves before you can even read them is still a thing.

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I remember the first time I used X Window and noticed windows not stealing focus. It was one of those times where you realize you have not even understood the full extent of your abuse. Approx. 20 years later and Windows still can't get this basic thing right.

I totally see the problem, but on the other hand, I explicitly disabled focus steal protection in CCSM because I occasionally missed some (to me relevant) notifications.

Right. It's not really a binary problem. Perhaps something like the Windows Action Center, or whatever it's called, is really needed at O/S level to make non-stealing work best as the default.

There are certainly plenty of ways it could be improved. Delaying focus stealing if a key has been pressed in the last 500ms or so would be a good start.

This is a really good idea and I'm going to go request it as a feature in Cinnamon right now.

Isn't that how it already works in a lot of WMs?

Today I found out that MS "solutions" can also go in the other direction by not telling you what happened.

Scenario:

- You're forced to use TFS. - Your credientials are managed by a Windows domain controller. - The same credentials are used to authentify with TFS. - Your password expires.

Welcome to a non-trivial amount of time trying to figure out what happened. This is the single scenario I've encountered so far where interrupting my workflow would have been sensible, and it seemingly is also the only one where Windows doesn't do it.

I miss Git so much ._.

I've been there. I feel your pain.

In hopes of helping to restore some of your sanity, I've found the following helps immensely: https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs

Thanks for the tip.

Unfortunately, there still are workplaces that are absolutely paranoid when it comes to software you can use, so I won't be able to try it. But hey, there's always a chance someday we'll get to change the VCS we're using, so hope dies last :)

One of my favorite things about OSX is the fact that applications rarely / never are allowed to steal focus.

It's better than on Windows but it still happens to me, especially with update alerts.

It most definitely does, such as Google Calendar event alerts at least under Chrome. I'm not sure why it doesn't have unobtrusive desktop alerts instead. I'll have to take a look later to see if that's an option.

Chrome on macOS always drove me mental, because of their absolutely terrible and reimplemented notifications system. Drove me batty. Nowadays I browse in Safari and develop in Firefox and Safari, so I don't know if it still does this

They actually switched to native notifications as of about two weeks ago.

I'm still on an older version of Office and it has it's own alerts system that I can't control. Maddening.

There is an option in Google Calendar under settings -> notifications -> Use browser notifications instead of interruptive alerts

FaceTime FacePalm

I rarely, if ever, have focus stolen on my windows machines.

For a while I was using the Rocket.Chat desktop client. Sometimes an alert would just flash the taskbar, other times an alert would steal focus. I couldn't work out why only sometimes.

Plug in a phone and a popup steals focus. Some photo thing.

True, but you probably won't be actively working in some other app when that happens. Your hands were, up until that point, actively involved in connecting the phone to the laptop. It's still a bit annoying - maybe you only wanted to plug in the phone in order to charge it. But I'd say for that moment, the phone is your focus, and the pop-up app is related to that.

I plug in the phone to charge it or to test an app I'm writing, so no, the phone is not my focus and the pop-up is not related to what I'm doing.

A much better solution is a notification, which is what Windows and KDE do.

You also have the option to disable it once you have plugged in the phone for the first time, in both Photos and iTunes.

For each new phone. It's beyond annoying and can be embarrassing when Photos opens to reveal your colleague's pictures stored on his/her phone. I've learned to open Photos first and hide as much of the application as possible before plugging in a new phone.

While I mostly agree with you I recently had a corrupted keychain that I was trying to fix. In the process I was transferring items from one keychain to another and had 100+ dialogs pop up asking me to enter my password to allow each individual item. Once started, there was no way to cancel the dialogs easily, no way to bulk authenticate, no way to see/sort the windows and no way to associate any particular dialog with any particular to know where I was in the process if I did decide to abort and start again. Fun times.

Granted this was an edge case and is not the norm. It was still a pretty horrid UX.

I have the opposite experience. Focus stealing is such a problem for me in OSX to the point where I actually noticed the issue. I'm sure there's focus stealing in windows as well but never to the point where it got in the way of work.

> never are allowed to steal focus

How are they not 'allowed'? Because it is certainly allowed. Just about every app steals focus.

The biggest offender for me is Webex on macOS. Start conference, steals focus. Presenter switches, steal focus. Really annoying as I multitask (often to slack for coordination) at the same time.

Literally happened to me the other day:

I was typing something in Slack and sudd-

> A new version of Ubuntu is available. Would you like to upgrade? [Don't Upgrade] [Ask me Later] [Yes, Upgrade Now]

-enly I found out that "spacebar" acts as a click of the selected default button and the rest of my sentence ended up in the password field.

I dismissed the slightly confused password prompt and didn't see the message again for the remainder of the day.

Yes, Canonical, while I'm typing something in Slack is exactly the moment I want to tell you whether I want to update my operating system.

I hate this kind of thing so much!

We already have a mechanism for detecting if the user is busy or not, which activates the screen saver and power management.

If you really need to get my attention, a little flashing icon in the corner (while not preferred) is still much better than stealing my focus.

Well, my cat did install Windows 10 on my laptop. I guess he can upgrade Ubuntu too :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308232

One thing that still happens to me on an infrequent but regular basis is clicking on something I didn't intend because something popped up under my cursor. In general, this seems like a hard problem to solve. I want notifications to pop up but I could happen to be doing something in that area of the screen.

A trivial solution is a delay before any pop-up accepts input. Chances are a click on something that only appeared 50 ms ago is a mistake.

It seems like the O/S should have some idea of normal human response time and just filter out inputs that follow too closely.

....and you've just destroyed a whole slew of ui automation scripts.

Good point. It would be fine with me to place the burden of disabling the behavior onto such scripts, though, if I never had to deal with again. Apparently Firefox actually implemented this, so presumably it did break some people's scripts. But for an established O/S, I guess this would be a huge deal.

Firefox implemented something a few years ago where buttons on pop-ups were greyed out for a few seconds, to avoid this. I believe it was a security concern that an online game could get you to click in a certain place at a certain time, and make a pop-up just before it asking for permission to do something, so you clicked Accept without meaning to.

They also have something like this on the download dialog, where the accept button stays gray unless the dialog has focus.

Paradox games, which are plagued by pop up windows to the extent where they're quite similar to this game, seem to have implemented a ~50ms delay to accept a click. In the thousands of hours I've put into the game and the millions of popups I've received playing them I've rarely clicked something accidentally.

Just had this on my phone. Was playing a game that involved a bunch of tapping, and some system message (I have no idea what) popped up and was immediately dismissed (or confirmed!) as I happened to come down on one of its buttons at that exact instant. Seems so obvious that these things shouldn't become active until a few hundred ms after they appear.

Just like real life. I am sure this is intentional.

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