Comment by eviks
4 days ago
> Why do you presume to tell me how I perform a task?
Why do you keep presuming you can make up your own example when arguing about a different one??? The original premise "depends entirely on what you're switching from and to and for what reason", so of course if you change your conditions you'll have different outcome re. focus stealing!
> You have been arguing that it should
No, you've been missing the point this whole time.
> I don't know where this came from, but it's not in my comments
It is, I suggested you imagine the case where you'd like the change of focus to happen in response to some conditions you find favorable, yet several times you faield to address it as is and kept bringing up different conditiosn.
> I think your emotional response to this discussion has you conflating commenters.
I think if you're that bad at reading literal text you shouldn't attempt at trying to read emotional state of that author.
> If you want to advocate for configuration to allow focus stealing that's fine
So why do you keep arguing that it's not fine because you can't imagine a situation where it is?
> But you've been arguing as if it's silly that anyone would want it any other way than you.
Nope, that's you misreading again. I have no issue with people who want a dumbed down "never steal" config.
Maybe the silly part here is people ostensibly supporting computers respecting user choices arguing against being able to better configure your computer to respect user choices.
If computers could read thoughts and 100% reliably determine when the user is done with their current task and would like to switch back to the other application, then yes, it would definitely make sense to implement the functionality you're describing.
In the real world, where it's impossible for the OS to distinguish between the "You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start" scenario and the "you're still busy with the current task and don't want to switch to the other app yet" scenario, the safe choice is always to not steal the focus because the cost of switching too early is significantly higher than the cost of not switching.
If perfect is not possible let's do nothing? Your approach is likely the reason for the current bad global rule. You want to replace it with another bad global rule.
But in the real world I'd use proxy conditions to arrive at a rate of correct guesses that's satisfactory for me just like with everything else with computers (even basic mouse clicks), not use your total "safe" ban (safety has a trade-off, you can't resolve that universally)
I (and presumably a lot of other people) don't believe that it's possible to build a system that can dynamically determine when it's acceptable to steal focus with low enough error rate to make it better than a total ban.
Seemingly you disagree and believe that such a system is possible. Is there anything preventing you from implementing it to prove the doubters wrong?