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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed completely.

- Why are dialogs still a thing?

- Why is stealing focus still a thing?

Browser makers, operating system manufacturers: Stop it. Dialogs are hot garbage, and users ALONE should have control over input focus. If you need the user's attention flash/animate.

If you cannot make a thing without a dialog, focus lock, or focus theft then maybe the thing you were trying to make was inherently a bad idea.

Windows is terrible at this. I was running the Visual Studio Installer in the background and it stole key-input focus dozens of times, often going to black dialog boxes that immediately closed leaving focus on nothing.

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Firefox and Chrome don't steal focus in this dialog. It's not modal either.

Firefox absolutely steals focus for this permissions dialog, as recently as AFTER you made that post (Firefox 66.0.1).

Can't reproduce. Tried stern.de, Firefox 66. Scrolling with keys still works. I tried clicking the search as fast as possible before the permissions dialog comes. Key input still works after dialog appears.

I had no idea wth you were talking about until you mentioned Visual Studio Installer, then I knew immediately what you meant.

This is a huge problem for Windows and Mac.

Open notepad. Press a key over and over. If the key-press stops going to notepad then focus has been transferred/stolen. Firefox's Notification Permission dialog has this behavior within the browser.

For example go to Reddit or Facebook, start entering text, the notification permission dialog will appear, steal focus, and now your key-presses go into a black hole.

The whole concept of focus-theft is an anti-pattern. Interestingly one mobile operating systems originally designed out but has slowly been creeping back in.

Every time it happens, I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football: https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/Football_gag

Steam also has this problem in Linux, though that's the only program I can think of. Opening Steam results in three different windows stealing focus in sequence for no other reason than to tell you that Steam is in the process of opening.

4 for me. Updating, logging in, the client, and the ads.

I removed it from my panel just so I'd stop waiting for these if I misclicked it.

Software on Linux is not always better. IntelliJ for example took focus two times on startup for a long time.

For years browser vendors have displayed little yellow infobars at the top of the screen related to page functionality. These were visible enough but didn't demand immediate action in the way a dialog taking focus and overlaying the browser chrome and page does. Browser vendors had better UX options to choose.

And push notifications definitely fall into the "this is something you might wish to do to enhance page functionality" category rather than "this is something the browser needs you to action" category associated with dialog boxes.

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