[michaelmior]

One thing that still happens to me on an infrequent but regular basis is clicking on something I didn't intend because something popped up under my cursor. In general, this seems like a hard problem to solve. I want notifications to pop up but I could happen to be doing something in that area of the screen.

[owenjonesuk]

Firefox implemented something a few years ago where buttons on pop-ups were greyed out for a few seconds, to avoid this. I believe it was a security concern that an online game could get you to click in a certain place at a certain time, and make a pop-up just before it asking for permission to do something, so you clicked Accept without meaning to.

[digi_owl]

They also have something like this on the download dialog, where the accept button stays gray unless the dialog has focus.

[threepipeproblm]

It seems like the O/S should have some idea of normal human response time and just filter out inputs that follow too closely.

[jpitz]

....and you've just destroyed a whole slew of ui automation scripts.

[threepipeproblm]

Good point. It would be fine with me to place the burden of disabling the behavior onto such scripts, though, if I never had to deal with again. Apparently Firefox actually implemented this, so presumably it did break some people's scripts. But for an established O/S, I guess this would be a huge deal.

[dTal]

A trivial solution is a delay before any pop-up accepts input. Chances are a click on something that only appeared 50 ms ago is a mistake.

[tempestn]

Just had this on my phone. Was playing a game that involved a bunch of tapping, and some system message (I have no idea what) popped up and was immediately dismissed (or confirmed!) as I happened to come down on one of its buttons at that exact instant. Seems so obvious that these things shouldn't become active until a few hundred ms after they appear.

[flukus]

Paradox games, which are plagued by pop up windows to the extent where they're quite similar to this game, seem to have implemented a ~50ms delay to accept a click. In the thousands of hours I've put into the game and the millions of popups I've received playing them I've rarely clicked something accidentally.