1912593 - Non-native New mail notification steals focus

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

[Paul Keusemann]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I am not sure when this started but I am currently running Thunderbird 128.1.0esr (64-bit) running on Linux.

Edit/Settings/Incoming Mails:
When new messages arrive:
Enable Show an alert
Enable Use the system notification (problem occurs with this enabled or disabled)
Customize New Mail Alert:
Disable Mail Preview Text
Enable Subject
Enable Sender
Show New Mail Alert for 10 seconds

Receive new mail

Actual results:

The new mail alert pops up taking focus from the currently focused application for the duration of the new mail alert.

I have tired with Use the system notification enabled and disabled with no effect.
The only workaround seems to be to disable new message alerts.

Expected results:

The new message alert should pop up without taking focus.

Comment 1

[Baurzhan Ismagulov]

I have the same issue with 128.0.1esr under Debian 12.

Last known good: 115.3.1

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

The non-native notifications do grab focus, but system notifications do not. Tested on ubuntu 24.04.

Comment 3

[mathiaswe]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #2)

The non-native notifications do grab focus, but system notifications do not. Tested on ubuntu 24.04.

I'll have to disagree here. I have alerts.useSystemBacken true but notifications still steal focus.
I'm running Ubuntu 22.04 with Enlightenemnt 0.25.3 as window manager.

Comment 4

[Paul Keusemann]

I had to upgrade my Linux box from SLES 12 something to openSUSE 15.6, running KDE as the window manager and am no longer seeing this problem with Thunderbird 128.7.0esr. So, either it got fixed, or changing the window manager fixed it for me.

Comment 5

[mathiaswe]

I am suffering from the problem with TB 128.7.0esr and Enlightenment 0.25.3, so I suppose KDE helps. If I had to guess I wouldn't be surprised if TB tries to use "SystemBackend" but Enlightenment denies/refuses so TB drops back to its internal notification system, which then steals focus. This is supported by the fact that the "useSystemBackend" config option has no influence on the visual appearance of the notification for me...
What was your windowmanager before?

Comment 6

[Paul Keusemann]

I was running Thunderbird on an old SLES box but displaying on CDE on an even older Solaris 10 SPARC machine (SunBlade 2500).

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Right, if you don't see a visual difference, you definitely get the non-native notifications. They are miles apart.

Comment 8

[mathiaswe]

Alright, yeah that makes alot of sense. So it seems that TB has issues interacting with my Enlightenment notification server. I thought that was standardized in the freedesktop specification, but maybe either TB or E25 diverge. I've just tested sending some notifications with "notify-send" and that works fine, so I'll tend to suppose the issue is with TB.

Comment 9

[mathiaswe]

This issue resolved itself for me after updates of both TB and E25, not sure which one fixed it, but I'm not getting system notifications and they no longer steal focus \o/
Thanks for the support

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

-> WFM, thanks!