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.