Focus stealing prevention exists for two main reasons: One is security, since we need to prevent rogue apps from deceiving users into e.g. typing their password into another window. If apps can silently claim keyboard focus and open their own window over the currently focused one, this enables phishing and other similar attacks. The other...
It feels like it wouldn’t be that hard to just prevent stealing focus if the user is already typing…
And then just have the new window show up in focus if they haven’t been typing for a while, and/or don’t have an active text field
Yeah, that would help. There’s also the smaller risk of “I was going to click on something else, and this new window popped in under the mouse”
I think some applications also don’t accept input for the first couple seconds to prevent this. I vaguely remember something that had the dialogue boxes count down from 5 before you could click or keyboard-interact them.
Feels like the kind of problem with a lot of edge cases, but even catching 70% of the problems would be a big improvement
Yeah. I also think it was a bigger issue historically when programs were more likely to take a while to load, so you’d open something, do stuff while it’s loading, and then it’d be ready in the background.
But on a modern machine where you likely have an ssd, and potentially even an nvme SSD, a lot of times you just open a thing and instead of it showing up you get a notification 😅