Comments on: Bad application behaviour: stealing focus

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:21:40 +0000

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.

By: Ara Pehlivanian

Ara Pehlivanian — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 21:47:50 +0000

Carl: Yes! That’s the other thing that happens that I hate even more!

By: Carl de Billy

Carl de Billy — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 21:35:15 +0000

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.

By: Luke

Luke — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 19:03:25 +0000

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.

By: AndrewSeven

AndrewSeven — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:38:06 +0000

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.