8 ms·
This just makes me sad that windows stealing focus, grabbing a randomly typed space bar, and submitting themselves before you can even read them is still a thin
by tempestn 9y ago
This just makes me sad that windows stealing focus, grabbing a randomly typed space bar, and submitting themselves before you can even read them is still a thing.
- narrowtux 9y agoJust like real life. I am sure this is intentional.
- eckza 9y agoOne of my favorite things about OSX is the fact that applications rarely / never are allowed to steal focus.
- rocky1138 9y agoPlug in a phone and a popup steals focus. Some photo thing.
- ytjohn 9y agoTrue, but you probably won't be actively working in some other app when that happens. Your hands were, up until that point, actively involved in connecting the phone to the laptop. It's still a bit annoying - maybe you only wanted to plug in the phone in order to charge it. But I'd say for that moment, the phone is your focus, and the pop-up app is related to that.
- rocky1138 9y agoI plug in the phone to charge it or to test an app I'm writing, so no, the phone is not my focus and the pop-up is not related to what I'm doing. A much better solution is a notification, which is what Windows and KDE do.
- nerdponx 9y agoYou also have the option to disable it once you have plugged in the phone for the first time, in both Photos and iTunes.
- otachack 9y agoFor each new phone. It's beyond annoying and can be embarrassing when Photos opens to reveal your colleague's pictures stored on his/her phone. I've learned to open Photos first and hide as much of the application as possible before plugging in a new phone.
- pinum 9y agoIt's better than on Windows but it still happens to me, especially with update alerts.
- otachack 9y agoIt most definitely does, such as Google Calendar event alerts at least under Chrome. I'm not sure why it doesn't have unobtrusive desktop alerts instead. I'll have to take a look later to see if that's an option.
- girvo 9y agoChrome on macOS always drove me mental, because of their absolutely terrible and reimplemented notifications system. Drove me batty. Nowadays I browse in Safari and develop in Firefox and Safari, so I don't know if it still does this
- emilecantin 9y agoThey actually switched to native notifications as of about two weeks ago.
- valuearb 9y agoI'm still on an older version of Office and it has it's own alerts system that I can't control. Maddening.
- Beltiras 9y agoThere is an option in Google Calendar under settings -> notifications -> Use browser notifications instead of interruptive alerts
- T-zex 9y agoFaceTime FacePalm
- mercurysmessage 9y agoI rarely, if ever, have focus stolen on my windows machines.
- ajanuary 9y agoFor a while I was using the Rocket.Chat desktop client. Sometimes an alert would just flash the taskbar, other times an alert would steal focus. I couldn't work out why only sometimes.
- memco 9y agoWhile I mostly agree with you I recently had a corrupted keychain that I was trying to fix. In the process I was transferring items from one keychain to another and had 100+ dialogs pop up asking me to enter my password to allow each individual item. Once started, there was no way to cancel the dialogs easily, no way to bulk authenticate, no way to see/sort the windows and no way to associate any particular dialog with any particular to know where I was in the process if I did decide to abort and start again. Fun times. Granted this was an edge case and is not the norm. It was still a pretty horrid UX.
- andypants 9y agoI have the opposite experience. Focus stealing is such a problem for me in OSX to the point where I actually noticed the issue. I'm sure there's focus stealing in windows as well but never to the point where it got in the way of work. > never are allowed to steal focus How are they not 'allowed'? Because it is certainly allowed. Just about every app steals focus.
- r00fus 9y agoThe biggest offender for me is Webex on macOS. Start conference, steals focus. Presenter switches, steal focus. Really annoying as I multitask (often to slack for coordination) at the same time.
- michaelmior 9y agoOne thing that still happens to me on an infrequent but regular basis is clicking on something I didn't intend because something popped up under my cursor. In general, this seems like a hard problem to solve. I want notifications to pop up but I could happen to be doing something in that area of the screen.
- dTal 9y agoA trivial solution is a delay before any pop-up accepts input. Chances are a click on something that only appeared 50 ms ago is a mistake.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoIt seems like the O/S should have some idea of normal human response time and just filter out inputs that follow too closely.
- jpitz 9y ago....and you've just destroyed a whole slew of ui automation scripts.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoGood point. It would be fine with me to place the burden of disabling the behavior onto such scripts, though, if I never had to deal with again. Apparently Firefox actually implemented this, so presumably it did break some people's scripts. But for an established O/S, I guess this would be a huge deal.
- owenjonesuk 9y agoFirefox implemented something a few years ago where buttons on pop-ups were greyed out for a few seconds, to avoid this. I believe it was a security concern that an online game could get you to click in a certain place at a certain time, and make a pop-up just before it asking for permission to do something, so you clicked Accept without meaning to.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoI remember the first time I used X Window and noticed windows not stealing focus. It was one of those times where you realize you have not even understood the full extent of your abuse. Approx. 20 years later and Windows still can't get this basic thing right.
- blauditore 9y agoI totally see the problem, but on the other hand, I explicitly disabled focus steal protection in CCSM because I occasionally missed some (to me relevant) notifications.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoRight. It's not really a binary problem. Perhaps something like the Windows Action Center, or whatever it's called, is really needed at O/S level to make non-stealing work best as the default.
- tempestn 9y agoThere are certainly plenty of ways it could be improved. Delaying focus stealing if a key has been pressed in the last 500ms or so would be a good start.
- gduncan12 9y agoI used to love the update manager popups asking if I wanted to restart the computer in the middle of typing an essay and of course the space bar triggers the OK button so in the middle of my essay the computer immediately restarts, sometimes losing a good amount of work in the process. I am so glad to be off windows.
- btschaegg 9y agoToday I found out that MS "solutions" can also go in the other direction by not telling you what happened. Scenario: - You're forced to use TFS. - Your credientials are managed by a Windows domain controller. - The same credentials are used to authentify with TFS. - Your password expires. Welcome to a non-trivial amount of time trying to figure out what happened. This is the single scenario I've encountered so far where interrupting my workflow would have been sensible, and it seemingly is also the only one where Windows doesn't do it. I miss Git so much ._.
- rhencke 9y agoI've been there. I feel your pain. In hopes of helping to restore some of your sanity, I've found the following helps immensely: https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs
- btschaegg 9y agoThanks for the tip. Unfortunately, there still are workplaces that are absolutely paranoid when it comes to software you can use, so I won't be able to try it. But hey, there's always a chance someday we'll get to change the VCS we're using, so hope dies last :)
- pluma 9y agoLiterally happened to me the other day: I was typing something in Slack and sudd- > A new version of Ubuntu is available. Would you like to upgrade? [Don't Upgrade] [Ask me Later] [Yes, Upgrade Now] -enly I found out that "spacebar" acts as a click of the selected default button and the rest of my sentence ended up in the password field. I dismissed the slightly confused password prompt and didn't see the message again for the remainder of the day. Yes, Canonical, while I'm typing something in Slack is exactly the moment I want to tell you whether I want to update my operating system.
- ansible 9y agoI hate this kind of thing so much! We already have a mechanism for detecting if the user is busy or not, which activates the screen saver and power management. If you really need to get my attention, a little flashing icon in the corner (while not preferred) is still much better than stealing my focus.
- GFischer 9y agoWell, my cat did install Windows 10 on my laptop. I guess he can upgrade Ubuntu too :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308232