“sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”
Hah! That one’s going in my personal quotes list. Beautiful update of Arthur C. Clarke.
This is another example of what drives me crazy about Microsoft products. You have some behavior that everybody agrees is bad. Microsoft finally says, “OK, it is bad, we’ll fix it”. They “fix” it, but it still happens a lot. Several Windows versions later, we take it as a win if it happens rarely instead of all the time. Arrrggghhhh…
My Logitech Mouse software does the same thing.
I/ think it should be legal to kill the entire project team and it’s family to the third degree for eveery single app that exhibits that kind of behavior. and i’m stating it softly.
Someone already wrote a post about this…
I agree, it is very annoying!
X hasn’t been mentioned yet, so I thought I’d mention it.
With X, the application which gets focus is down to the X server, not the application. The window manager generally acts as guardian of the focus - deciding whether or not windows should be given it.
This works beautifully in, for example, KDE, where the focus-stealing problem simply doesn’t exist.
I fear the only way to fix this in Windows is with a redesign of the way windows are handled which would break all existing applications, so don’t expect to see a solution in the next couple of decades.
Other things I hate include popups telling me I have “little or no connectivity”, “that my desktop has unused icons”, “that a hacker is attempting to …”, “that there is a new version of java”, etc. Why does every browser need to inform the user that they are “sending information over the internet” every time it detects a virgin home directory?
For reference, emacs has a nice ui. Everything is a fully search/copy/paste-able buffer. The minibuffer is modal but it only gets activated at the user’s command. One exception is the slime debugger popup but that means things are hosed anyway. Another not-so-nicety is that activity in one window such as gdb or the minibuffer can cause a buffer in another window to be temporarily hidden - bad if you needed it for reference. All interfaces have their issues but the emacs ones are more like design tradeoffs. OTOH, popups stealing focus is truly stupid.
One of the old MMOs I used to play (Rubies of Eventide) would log you out of the game if you alt tabbed, supposedly to prevent cheating. This was back in the days when web browsers on windows would steal focus back any time a script on the page reloaded.
I died so many times to those damn page reloads.
Ever thought of choosing a window manager ?
“Windows needs to restart to finish installing updates”
…HULK SMASH!!!
I’m like Jeff, I’ll have 20 or 30 tabs open in Firefox, and windows will decide to let me know I’m going to have to read later, because some stupid update forces me to restart or face the focus-stealing dialog over and over and over and over and over.
And why do applications decide to steal focus MORE THAN ONCE while doing something.
We need to send this stuff to Microsoft. I only use Windows because everyone else is.
Google Talk, the least user-friendly desktop app from Google, throws a window in my face whenever someone wants to ping me. Live Messenger, on the other hand, simply flashes a window button in the taskbar.
IE downloads stealing focus… that is one of the reasons I stopped using it. No other browser copies to a temp directory then moves the file. I’ve had IE kill far too many 1 gig+ files to deal with that ever again.
Considering the major crook here is the automatic updater in Windows, a truly frustrating thing, I doubt the blame is to lay on third-parties or dismal programmers. It’s most likely a concious decision based on the assumption that the end-user doesn’t know what’s best for him unless it’s shoved down his throat.
For those living with it I can recommend the earlier post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000294.html
Can’t say I’ve experienced this with Linux though earlier commenter Felix Ple#351;oianu seems to suggest it can be an issue for some. At the very least you don’t live with the automatic updater and live messenger.
The root cause is really the basic assumption behind windows: That the user is always there, and he/she will always service the needs of the operating system rather the other way around.
You can see this even from when trying to install it: Windows has the neediest installer for any operating system today.
Give me twm any day.
The programmers can be bad ugly bastards, for all I care. If I use TweakUI and check on “don’t let programs steal focus”, and it still happens, Microsoft is to blame.
I lost count years ago of the number of times that I rebooted while writing an email or programming after a stupid reboot window from a driver, game, program or whatever installation poped up unexpectedly.
Also, why is it that 95% of the programs ask you to reboot when they finish installing?. Most of them don’t even touch the registry or your DS or S32 directories, just copy some files in a folder, put a shortcut in the start menu, and that’s it!
Bad programming, yeah, but Microsoft should be the one protecting us against it (yeah, wishful thinking, I know)
Maybe we could all chip in and buy Microsoft a decent SCM tool?
I hate them both… The only saving grace is that you can disable both features to prevent the reboot prompts! Every computer I use has Automatic Updates disabled (I’ll install when I’m ready) and I make a ton of little setting changes to IE before I consider it usable (Disble Download Notifications, Do not search from the Address Bar, Diable Friendly Error Messages, etc…).
Of course, using modal dialog boxes isn’t always A Bad Thing™ - sometimes, especially when you’re responding to user input a modal dialog box is okay.
It’s when focus stealing dialog boxes are spawned without any prompting from the user…
GMail now does this, actually. It jumps to the front when it finished loading. Incredibly annoying on my slow home connection; I tend to end up accidentally closing it half the time.
A somewhat related annoyance, and I’m not sure who’s to blame (the OS or individual program): blinking cursors in text input fields (e.g. password), even though the window doesn’t have focus. Multiple messenger windows tend(ed) to be bad about this. (Admittedly I’m a bad typist, so I don’t neccessarily look at the screen when I type.)