Comment by smallmancontrov
1 day ago
Focus-stealing, too! Especially bad with Microsoft products. I can picture exactly what happened: a thousand complaints of "I lost a window in the heaping mess of open work on my desktop" each turned into a ticket to add Just One More focus steal until the first minute of a Microsoft-powered desktop's existence is various projects fighting in a brawl to repeatedly steal focus from one another.
It was a major win for the internet that it took this power away from the application layer.
I have often thought about trying to figure out whatever Win32 API is responsible for focus stealing and neuter it down to something akin to
It is the single most frustrating desktop computing experience.
Problem it isn't an API, it is just unexpected consequences of how a few things work. Fixing this just isn't easy as the simple attempts will break even more than the frustrating thing you are trying to fix - and thus be worse.
That said, Microsoft should have fixed this long ago - it is hard but a few people can do it given a few years to work through all the special cases.
Not just frustrating, it's a security hole. Stealing focus means a user may expect to be typing a password but find it's inputted somewhere they did not expect.