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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

several seconds in the typing focus switches to a new tab

I've never understood why operating systems allow focus switching.

It's always been a pox on Windows, but macOS does this more and more these days. Just this morning, I plugged in a USB hard drive, then returned to my other work while it mounted. Suddenly, I'm typing a memo into Finder's password field to unlock the drive. Just. Stop. It.

If you need my attention, there is no shortage of methods to do that — Beep. Bounce the icon in the dock. Notifications messages. Your stupid program is not more important than whatever I'm doing at that moment in time.

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> Suddenly, I'm typing a memo into Finder's password field to unlock the drive. Just. Stop. It.

Normally I would lol at your misfortune but I actually got bitten by this too.

I restarted after a macOS update (remember when they used to update in the background and now every one requires a restart like Windows?) and 1Password needed my master password to unlock in the browser but apparently Messages app took a few seconds to load and when I saw the notification to enter my 1Pass master password I started typing and at that moment Messages took focus and I typed my master password into a message and hit enter to send.

Thankfully it was to my girlfriend, but still wtf.

The worst is when the application activates itself but isn't actually done loading or ready for user input. It's like the spam call I received once that immediately asked me to hold for the next available operator when I picked up the phone.

microsoft teams is the worst for this. It'll be loading for 10s, during which it will actually steal focus _multiple times_! (and then I have to login to my university account in order to logOUT of my university account so that I can login to my work account. What a marvelous piece of engineering.)

Agree, but the flip side of this is that occasionally Windows will prompt for admin access in the background, I won't notice, and a hour later wonder what happened to that app i tried to install.

I'm not a regular Windows users, but I believe Windows has lots of other ways to get people's attention, other than stealing it. Isn't that what the icon tray is for? Or blinking the program in the task bar?

No, when windows pops the admin auth prompt into the background the best and most reliable way to notice is to intuit that such a window should have appeared by now and go looking for it.

A lot of people (myself included) hide the task bar. That is a small price to pay to miss a notification though.

To name one use case off the top of my head. I use KeePassXC's autotype feature to fill in passwords all the time. That wouldn't work if it was prevented by the OS from switching focus.

> I've never understood why operating systems allow focus switching.

KDE calls this "Focus stealing" and has a setting to disable it.

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