238543 - signonsandiego.com pages always grab focus while loading

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Tony Tovar]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7a) Gecko/20040127 Firebird/0.8.0+ (stipe)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7a) Gecko/20040127 Firebird/0.8.0+ (stipe)

I don't know if the fault lies with the code at signonsandiego.com (the web-site
for the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper) or with Mozilla/Firefox.  But
whenever you open their home-page or any of their stories, the page continually
grabs window-focus while loading.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. open the signonsandiego.com homepage
2. right-click on any story and select Open in New Window
3. when the new window opens, try to switch back to the original

Actual Results:  
the new window will repeatedly grab 'focus', i.e., it will become the active
browser window.

Expected Results:  
Focus should stay on the homepage (or any other page you've manually selected).

Comment 1

[Tony Tovar]

adding as blocker to bug 140346 (Focus Stealing Bugs tracking)

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Article pages on that site have code for pop-unders.  While the pop-under is
conditional, the window.focus() is not.  (I used the "view scripts" bookmarklet
and searched the resulting page for "focus".)  You'll see the same annoying
behavior in Internet Explorer.  Invalid.

To prevent the site from being annoying, go to Tools > Options > Web Features >
Advanced and uncheck "Raise or lower windows".

Comment 3

[Tony Tovar]

Jesse,
Thanks for figuring this out; your suggestion works.  What consequences would
there be to disabling "Raise or lower windows"?  I guess I don't understand how
this is different than the general Block Popups functionality.

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

I haven't noticed any negative effects from unchecking "Raise or lower windows".
 In the worst case, a script that tries to grab focus for a good reason will
fail to grab focus.

Unchecking "Raise or lower windows" prevents scripts from grabbing focus. 
Blocking popups restricts when scripts are allowed to open extra windows.