[somat]

I am not sure, as a convert to the church of "focus follows mouse" I sort of want well... my focus to follow the mouse and the mouse to follow me.

Now there may be a legitimate case to steal focus, but I am unable to think of one at the moments and your click link example fails to convince me.

I also sort of hate modal dialogs/windows. I think modals are in general an indicator of lazy/bad design. That being said, there are legitimate cases for modals. but "stop the world and handle me" should be a last resort not the first.

[TheAceOfHearts]

The legitimate use-cases for stealing focus are situations where an immediate response is required and timing is limited. For example: after you queue up for a ranked League of Legends game, there's a timed confirmation popup that appears when 10 players are found and which all players are required to accept before the game moves on to the draft.

In purely software spaces there's usually nothing that urgent happening. If something is really urgent it's usually going to be because it carries significant real-world consequences. Emergency alerts on smartphones are a good example of taking immediate priority over all other activities, especially if it's something like a warning of incoming missiles.

[Dylan16807]

At the very least you need the ability to show the browser when you send a link to it. And if that overlaps the window you were clicking the link in, then it'll now be under the mouse. Are you happy with that indirect focus steal? If not, I don't think there's a way to align your preferences with the average user.

[tremon]

That's a situation where the focus doesn't need stolen at all, the focus could be delegated by the active window itself.

[Dylan16807]

> delegated

Yes that's being included under "stolen" in this conversation, at least how I'm interpreting it. Done without explicit user action.

[zamadatix]

I'm of the cult of "focus follows mouse" as well but I think the same conversation exists regardless, just not for the specific case you already had your browser window positioned elsewhere from the window your mouse is currently over.