Oh, focus stealing can be worse than that.
http://bash.org/?4848
Speaking of IE and stealing focus. That has to be my current biggest pet peeve about any software that I use routinely. I have to assume I am not the only person who has participated in the race where you are trying to type something in the IE address bar while it is loading a web page. If you are quick enough to get it all typed in before the new page starts loading, if not you will have to repeatedly click back on the address bar to take the focus off the loading page. Combined with the unfortunate UI design choice in IE7 to make the stop button tiny and in a place that is hard to spot it makes for a frustrating experience. I still havenât tuned my motor skills to find and click that browser stop button quickly. Arenât stop buttons supposed to be giant red buttons that you canât avoid looking at if you wanted to?
I often discover, usually just as I press Enter, that half the text I thought Iâd typed in the search box at the top of Firefox has ended up in the address box instead. Dunno whatâs up with Firefox to steal focus between UI components like this, but itâs damn irritating.
I hope the authors of Pidgin are reading thisâŚ
Stupid thing steals focus like crazy; itâs rather embarassing when Iâm typing code in an IDE, and find myself sending it off to someone in an IM instead!
I have to admit though: Itâs almost funny when they know nothing about coding, and think their PC just went berserk. 
This reminded me of something I saw on something awful:
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/9930/qirexho2.jpg
(slightly edited to be family-friendly)
Yes, KDE did get it right. Or more accurately, kept the old, correct, behaviour from prior window managers.
Itâs kind of depressing that the vast majority of computer users (Windows and Mac) have to put up with such moronically mis-designed window management schemes that aggravate and confuse them every single day. The fact that MS apps can steal focus on OSX means that OSX is half-baked, not just that MS apps are crappy.
Thereâs a delicious irony that X, not exactly known through the years for its âuser-friendlinessâ, gets this important thing right where the mainstream OSâs get it so wrong.
Oh well, thereâs hope yet for Windows yet if MS ever decide to do what Apple did and just run win32 binaries in little VMâs, and do one better and implement a sane X-style window manager to contain them.
There is related problem in browsers:
Applications should not change the contents of a textbox while a user is typing in it, caret should not be moved away from the textbox either.
Example 1:
You point your browser at Gmail, and as soon as the username and password fields appear, you begin filling them in, but while you are in the middle of that, auto-fill-passwords kicks in and screws up your shit⌠you may find yourself typing out your password in a non-censored textbox.
Example 2:
Typing into the main address bar of a browser while it is loading a pageâŚ
They have a fix for this: Linux! Seriously, in KDE (probably Gnome also) you can toggle the level of focus stealing. Mine is at the highest level (of non-focus stealing) so that even when you open a window, itâs put in the background, so that it loads and patiently waits for itâs master the way a good computer program should. Not like in Windows, where if I open 4 firefox windows I get interrupted 3 times as each one opens.
This focus problem is probably my single greatest pet peeve in Windows computing.
Javascript alerts. I even have a solution to it, though it involves sidebar bloat.
Matlab is one of the most annoying applications in this respect. If you are running a long script that generates any graphics, it will steal the focus EACH TIME it generates one. If youâve done any serious matlab work, you know that there are often jobs that run for great lengths of time. During the time it is generating graphical output - it will continually engage the user in a tug-of-war for the focus. But thatâs not the most annoying behavior.
If a script errors out, it WILL NOT return focus to the application (unless the debugger stop on errors is enabled). The one time you really want to be bothered - it wonât bother you.
To me, itâs not just pop ups and dialogs.
I know my computer is slow at certain applications (read Office).
So Iâm normally just working in my browser and I (want to) start Word in the background, I click on the icon in the start menu and go back to whatever I was working on.
But no, Word has to pop up and stay in focus all the time and freeze for a couple of minutes (while not using any CPU or HDD). Usually stealing focus for a portion of the time from any other app.
Or when you are typing a document, and that means hitting the space bar every second or so, and up pops a dialog that disappears.
And the update dialog that reboots by default is particularly gross.
The all time classic is âClick OK to restart you computerâ
Itâs so important that you reboot now that you get no other options
However you can just move it out of the way and carry on so it obviously is not that important after all?
Why do they give you no other button if there truly is no other option ,or have a reboot later option if that is applicable
This is simply bad design, Is it important or not? If itâs not obvious then it is badly designed
âNever ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.â
â Napoleon Bonaparte
âAt some level, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.â
â Jeff Atwood
SoâŚin language we can all understand:
incompetence ~= malice
incompetence == malice for really large values of 'incompetence'
Iâll never forget that time Skype stole the focus from me. I had just initiated a remote desktop and was just about to type my password in, when a skype chat message popped up and I typed my password in to a co-worker.
My password was orange, and now he knows it.
David Avraamides wrote:
âI call bullshit on your anecdotal story: why wasnât the local copy of the source code on the developerâs machine still good? And if it was half checked in, then those files just wonât be updated on the next checkin.â
Youâre half-right. The story was bullshit, but it wasnât anecdotal, it was rhetorical. Furthermore it was recursively rhetorical, and it included an auxiliary jab about checkins, and it borrowed a line from an old science fiction story where a magician was stuck halfway in and halfway out of a Klein bottle.
So it was bullshit. There must be some other reason why a fix exceeds Microsoftâs programming capabilities.
Linux suffers from this as well. The focus-stealing-prevention settings in Gnome do not work. Perhaps KDE is better, from the sounds of some others here.
Switch to Mac OS X 
it does that too⌠iTunes comes to the front often on things like detecting an iPod
The problem with Windows is that itâs OK to steal focus some time, but something should be done for the keyboard accelerators for the buttons should be.
Windows Update it not too bad.
*** the cases that drove me to Firefox : ***
- Download a file with IE 6
- after itâs downloaded to the cache, it copied it to the 'right location;
- Focus-stealing progress bar shows up WITH THE CANCEL BUTTON GETTING THE FOCUS
- Result: copying is cancelled, you have to find back where you were and download the file again
All the damn progress bars on Windows have keyboard focus on the Cancel button!!
In Vista this is a little bit better. But not much. Itâs
still the same principle. You can now tell it to remind you up
to 4 hours later. But still not âNever!â. I really donât see whyâŚ
Windows Update has to force people to reboot, otherwise they never do. They keep putting it up to later and never get the critical security installed.
Outlook is the absolute worst offender (after the Automatic Updates).
Iâd love to hammer the thumbs of the guy responsible for that one.