Client: Client unnecessarily attention grabbing and focus stealing

Created on 12 Mar 2017 · 6Comments · Source: keybase/client

I do like keybase, but am getting very annoyed at the Windows client lately because of its attention grabbing behavior:

It shows its window after windows start up/log in. Why? I have not yet found a way to turn this off. It's great that it starts automatically, but please stay in the background.
It randomly steals focus. This behavior is very frowned upon in the ecosystem, and is particularly bad when you play a game, as it even throws you out of the full-screen mode. Might be related to updates. Is this really necessary? No other application I know of does that on Windows.

Please consider to be less annoying. Thanks :)

Source

cdrnet

👍7

Most helpful comment

It is true, the app grabs focus when it starts, which happens each time it is updated or your computer boots. Tracked with https://keybase.atlassian.net/browse/DESKTOP-2669

zanderz on 13 Mar 2017

👍4

All 6 comments

It is true, the app grabs focus when it starts, which happens each time it is updated or your computer boots. Tracked with https://keybase.atlassian.net/browse/DESKTOP-2669

zanderz on 13 Mar 2017

👍4

The focus-stealing behaviour is driving me insane. To the point where I now want to uninstall this stupid app rather than have it steal focus one more time.

Point me at the rough vicinity of the code governing this and I will put in a PR.

henrebotha on 16 May 2018

@henrebotha We made changes to honor the previous state of the app when starting, so if it was backgrounded it shouldn't pop up, and this works for me - in what situation exactly are you getting focus stolen? is it the main app UI or the updater? etc.

zanderz on 16 May 2018

Windows 10. The app is confined to the system tray - the UI is not currently open anywhere. While I'm in a full-screen game, the updater pops up and forces itself to the foreground, backgrounding my game (as if I'd alt-tabbed to the updater).

henrebotha on 17 May 2018

👍2

Add OS X to this. After an auto-update while I was typing an email, it popped back up, I minimized it, started typing again, and it maximized itself and grabbed focus.

My frustration is still with me.

mrbass21 on 12 Mar 2019

@zanderz looking for an update here. On windows 10 the updater runs every hour and steals focus. If I'm playing a game, it pulls me out. If I'm working, it pulls me out. On MacOS the app behaves, but on Windows 10 this behavior is terrible. Please make the updater configurable in some way.