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.
I 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.
I 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.
Right. 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.
There 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.
Today 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.
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 :)
It 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.
Chrome 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
While 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.
True, 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.
For 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.
I 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.
The 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.
For 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.
One 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.
Firefox 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.
Good 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.
Just had this on my phone. Was playing a game that involved a bunch of tapping, and some system message (I have no idea what) popped up and was immediately dismissed (or confirmed!) as I happened to come down on one of its buttons at that exact instant. Seems so obvious that these things shouldn't become active until a few hundred ms after they appear.
Paradox games, which are plagued by pop up windows to the extent where they're quite similar to this game, seem to have implemented a ~50ms delay to accept a click. In the thousands of hours I've put into the game and the millions of popups I've received playing them I've rarely clicked something accidentally.
