Bad application behaviour: stealing focus
If you use Google Talk you’re probably accustomed to this scenario. You’re typing along in a window doing some work when all of a sudden a Google Talk window pops up in your face, steals the focus and half of what you were typing ends up in the Google Talk input field.
Apps stealing focus while I’m working is one of my pet peeves. It just happened to me again while I was working in Eclipse. I had run a project wide search for a particular term and was stepping through the results using the “next” arrow button when the Console tab decided to steal focus in order to dump some information. The result? Well the “stop server” button just happens to be located exactly where the “next” button was, so my inevitable accidental click resulted in a stopped server. What a pain.
You may be thinking “yeah but you can just configure…”, no! I don’t want to have to configure every app I install for it to behave. Apps should not steal focus by default.
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5 Comments
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February 16th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Apps should ask the OS for focus; Windows starts blinking the item on
the start bar. Apps that force themselves to the front are bad.
With tabs in an app, they should follow a similar behhavior.
February 16th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Completely agree. But you describe two different situations hrere:
The google talk example is one application stealing focus from another one which is fundamentally evil. Here, just flashing the toolbar or providing some other visual and/or audible clue would be enough.
In Eclipse on the other hand you have one module stealing focus of another one within the same application - may or may not be important to the core functionality of the app.
But yes, focus stealing ruins productivity - because it distracts you from what you are doing, by demanding that you immediately deal with the application that stole it.
February 16th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
I also hate it. But… the worse in when you are typing something and a window suddently appears to ask about something… but while you were typing, you hit the “hot key” of one of the button on that new windows.
After that, you have absolutely no idea what you did… it was too fast. That’s terribly annoying and will be worse in Vista because a LOT of new popup will be there to ask for EVERY security mecanism.
Carl.
February 16th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Carl: Yes! That’s the other thing that happens that I hate even more!
March 7th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Oh man - what Carl described happened to me yesterday. AIM decided to update itself and it was doing stuff in the background as I was typing. Then I saw some confirmation dialog pop up in the corner, as I was pressing enter…
Needless to say, I had no clue if I pressed OK, Cancel or what. :P
Worst application behavior ever.