Comment by smallmancontrov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smallmancontrov | Hacker News Reader

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smallmancontrov

Focus-stealing, too! Especially bad with Microsoft products. I can picture exactly what happened: a thousand complaints of "I lost a window in the heaping mess of open work on my desktop" each turned into a ticket to add Just One More focus steal until the first minute of a Microsoft-powered desktop's existence is various projects fighting in a brawl to repeatedly steal focus from one another.

It was a major win for the internet that it took this power away from the application layer.

I have often thought about trying to figure out whatever Win32 API is responsible for focus stealing and neuter it down to something akin to

  void steal_focus_when_user_is_least_expecting() {
    // stub, much better :)
  }

It is the single most frustrating desktop computing experience.

Not just frustrating, it's a security hole. Stealing focus means a user may expect to be typing a password but find it's inputted somewhere they did not expect.

Problem it isn't an API, it is just unexpected consequences of how a few things work. Fixing this just isn't easy as the simple attempts will break even more than the frustrating thing you are trying to fix - and thus be worse.

That said, Microsoft should have fixed this long ago - it is hard but a few people can do it given a few years to work through all the special cases.

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