569409 - lose keyboard focus and/or desktop selection when using virtual desktop

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Alain Knaff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100423 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.4

Thunderbird somehow causes virtual desktops being "yanked" to its own under some circumstances

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start thunderbird
2. While it is starting up, switch to a different virtual desktop
3. Perform some work on other desktop
Actual Results:  
After a while, when thunderbird is ready, it forcefully causes the desktop system (observed on KDE) to be switched to Thunderbird's own virtual desktop

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should not interfere with virtual desktop system or keyboard focus.

According to KDE developers, the APIs governing keyboard focus and virtual desktop choice are intended only for KDE components (such as desktop pagers, taskbars, etc.) and not for general applications. See discussion in the following bugs:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240332

This is a thing that has the potential to:
- cause major disruption (user is interrupted in his work by the sudden switching of virtual desktop)
- data loss (if user is a fast typer, his keystrokes intended for another app are being misdirected to thunderbird where they may be misinterpreted as potentially disastrous shortcuts deleting messages, folder etc.)
- loss of mail privacy (if desktop switch happens while a third party is looking, for example during a demo, pair programming, or similar activity)

If thunderbird needs the user's attention (such as for password entry, for notification of error conditions), there are less disruptive ways to do this (such as flashing its icon)

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

similar to firefox issues.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

does this also happen for you with firefox?

Comment 3

[Alain Knaff]

Haven't seen this happening in a while.

However, if I remember correctly, back in the day, Firefox was indeed affected. One way to show the problem used to be to have a web page which would pop up a (javascript) alert() after a fixed amount of time.

Nowadays, alerts() are no longer shown as popups, but rather within the page, and this no longer triggers the obnoxious behavior.

Similarly, Thunderbird nowadays also makes less usage of popup dialogs, and so the problem does no longer occur.

However, it is hard to know whether this is only because of the avoidance of popup dialogs, or whether popups themselves have been fixed in Firefox/Thunderbird so as to no longer have that side effect.

Comment 4

[Alain Knaff]

Actually, I mis-spoke: there is one case where it still happens with Firefox: when clicking on a URL within a mail, and no Firefox window is present on current desktop, but a Firefox window is on another desktop.

Probably desirable in most cases, but could lead to privacy issues during a demo or during pair programming (unexpected switch to a desktop having NSFW items on it...)

Bug #482950 focuses more on that particular case, with suggestions on how to implement calling Firefox from other applications without yanking desktop, and without leaving user wondering where that action went (i.e. create new Firefox window if none present yet on current desktop).