From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686; en-US; rv:0.9) Gecko/20010505 Description of problem: This bug covers one of the major gripes I have with just about every window-based GUI ever made (except NeXTStep which got it right)... Both KDE and Gnome under every version of Linux I've used assume that the "key window" and the "front window" are the same. Because of this assumption, when windows are created (such as launching a program), the first document window is created as the front window. The problem with this is that the user may be typing into another window... when the new window pops up it brings itself forward, steals all input from the user, buries the previous window and makes itself both front and key. This pretty much makes life miserable becase now the user has to go hunting for the window he or she was interacting with. Of course the interaction and keystrokes typed into the old window are lost and productivity and user enjoyment are drastically reduced. Windows does this as do all of the Linux desktops I've used and its really very annoying and naive. Just because I run a program or create a new document DOES NOT mean I necessarily want it forced into my face since I may be doing work someplace else. NeXTStep got it right because this OS had a very good model for separating key and front windows as well as tiering its windows. You could type in one window and create windows without disturbing your work. New windows could even be made front without disturbing the key window. Similar chaos insues when a GUI uses too many modal dialog panels. Microsoft Windows is particularly dialog happy. Linux less so but there are times when modal dialogs pop up at inconvenient times, stealing user input and performing actions not intended. Although this isn't a "bug" as such, I consider this to be a major defect in any UI. I'm assuming this is a Sawfish issue. Reassign as appropriate. -- John How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Run the text editor and start typing. 2.Launch Mozilla. 3.Return to the text editor and keep typing. 4.Mozilla windows come up and say goodbye to your important keystrokes. Actual Results: Data loss Expected Results: I should be able to type UNINTERRUPTED. Additional info:
I am afraid you are in the minority for this behavior. I can understand it if the new window in question is a transient window... and sawfish does allow you to set it up where those will stay only with their parents and will not steal focus. I suspect that you should be able to write some lisp code that would allow new windows to not grab focus - you might want to ask on the sawfish mailing list (http://sawmill.sourceforge.net/) Otherwise I am going to close this because I believe for most people it is the expected behavior when opening a new application. Thanks for the report.