Firefox sucks. No, really!
Warning: big rant ahead.
I received some comments on my previous post, as expected. Most of them were helpful; e.g., the oldbar extension is very useful. One of them was silly.
It depends: If your application is "fullscreened", clicking on the link without having the focus could lead to interesting situation like "Hey, It does nothing?"
Just to make a point here, let me reiterate:
There is no excuse whatsoever to steal the focus
Sorry for the shouting, but seriously. I have the following in my icewm configuration:
ClickToFocus = 0 RaiseOnFocus = 0 FocusOnMap = 0 FocusOnAppRaise = 0 FocusOnMapTransient = 0 FocusOnMapTransientActive = 1 RaiseOnClickClient = 0
What this means is that I don't want anything to either get the focus or get on top of anything else all by itself, unless it happens to be a new dialog box created by an application that already has the focus. I also don't want windows to appear on top of anything else just because they received the focus. I also happen to prefer focus-follows-mouse, which you can get by way of the ClickToFocus thing.
The reason I prefer it this way, is that often I have several applications open all at once. For instance, when I read RSS feeds, I have my RSS reader open on one virtual desktop, and read through the articles. Since my laptop's processor is much, much faster in certain things than is my network, I also make use of its multitasking abilities to have it preload links in the background (on another virtual desktop, preferably).
Unfortunately, somehow, firefox manages to bypass all that configuration and shows up in front, stealing the focus; and in the process, it completely interferes with the way I work. No doubt they do this in order to help some hypothetical "grandma" or other stupid clueless person who's never used a computer before, but let me tell you something: software should be written for people who actually do use software, not for stupid nitwits who can't even read an error message that tells them "you cannot do A, please go ahead and do B instead".
But I guess I'm too stupid or something to understand the usability "experts" who know it all best and say that software should be "intuitive" so that those who are 53 and see a computer for the first time in their live can sit right next to it and start emailing.
Hah.
As if the above wasn't enough, firefox 3 also is a crashing load of shit. I just spent the better part of an hour to try and make a payment using my bank's excellent online payment software which requires nothing more than javascript, SSL, and a digipass 810 that is provided by the bank as part of the online banking contract. Unfortunately firefox insisted on crashing halfway through entering the required information, for six times in a row. You'd think I'd be filing a bug now, but no, it managed to crash in a different location every time. I'd probably have to start debugging firefox to get this done, which is not something I'll do in this life.
You know what the problem is? Webbrowser developers think they're developing the most important application for any computer. They're not. It's just a webbrowser, no more important than an xterm or a mail client: a tool to get a job done. Period.
Grunt.
Like you said, there's no excuse whatsoever for an application to steal the focus. But I'd like to take that a step further. I want FF tabs to stop stealing the focus. Every time some website on some tab opens any kind of dialog (JS alert window, HTTP AUTH box, cookie setting request, ...) it'll change the focus to that tab. Every time this happens, I die a little on the inside. What the hell is the point of having tabs, if the tab I WANT TO USE gets replaced with some other tab? Ugh!
Seriously, if anyone knows of some way to make FF behave focus-wise, please share your wisdom!
Man, as a Debian user I'm very thankful for your work. Also I feel the need to advice you to calm down and take it easy. When this level of aggressivity arises one should think if everything is ok.
Just think how you'd react to such comments, how constructive they are, and why such an insignificant issue can disturb you so much.
I must have missed your previous post because i now only see the followup ...
I run tab mix plus (still the developer version since the final is not yet released for firefox 3) but there it does not appear to steal focus (maybe it is due to my settings: I run it in single window mode so every new pop-up or link clicked opens in a new tab)
And about the crashing part: I did not see it crash a lot, especially not as much as you describe (and yes i am also a hardcore user), not sure what iceweasel adds but couldn't that also be part of the problem? (not wanting to point any fingers, but only an idea, since i have seen before that plugins for firefox,thunderbird etc work fine on the original versions but not on the ice-versions ...)
hey wouter, that new behavior of firefox really sucks
set browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to True and firefox will stop of pissing you off.
good luck.
Given this premise, wouldn't it make sense to patch IceWM (assuming it doesn't already have an option) to ignore window raise requests?
Other window managers (Metacity, Compiz) already do this, with configurable levels of focus-stealing-prevention logic.
Very much agreed.
I use ratpoison myself, and if some application (in Debian/Etch the most notable is Thunderbird) steals the focus just because I clicked in its Window, I may not notice. The next time I try to type in what was the active xterm, my keystrokes get interpreted as thunderbird keystrokes instead. This can get really confusing.
Sure, ratpoison does have a variable (called rudeness) that can be configured to ignore these requests, but I feel I shouldn't have to set it.
When applications don't try and guess where I want focus, I can interact with one window with the mouse and another windows via the keyboard.
Brian May
If it can help anyone, I just found a solution to this "stealing focus" annoyance.
Just set the key 'browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground' to true through about:config page. It would be nice to see such a default choice to be enable in the iceweasel packaging.
-- moSaN
In about:config set browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to True
I agree! That should be the default or even better the default should be to honor the WM settings...
Have a nice day
pachi,
You don't use computers very much if you think focus stealing is no big deal.
I have zero respect for any programmer who thinks his application is so important that it can steal the focus away from the user. There are NO valid excuses for focus stealing and I don't use window managers (or operating systems like Windows) that don't have a mechanism for disabling this sort of utter, complete nonsense.