Comment by signal11 2 days ago
Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.”
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.
That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.
Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.
This is a constant irritation for me on Windows.
I work on a desktop Windows/Mac application that takes forever and a day to launch (CAD package), and pops up a million pop-ups during the process. I try to get minor admin tasks done while it is compiling/launching, but it steals focus every 10 seconds!
Still beats using XCode, though
Windows 11 also broke the active window from focusing when waking from sleep. Whenever I wake my PC, no window is active. I'll still have a fullscreen Chrome or whatever, but if I try to do Ctrl+T to open a tab nothing happens because nothing is in focus. I have to Alt+Tab once to bring it into focus.
I recently built a windows PC again for gaming. Haven't used one for years. Everything's fresh, loads of room on hard drives etc and still sometimes it'll just be weird and needs a reset. But it doesn't surprise me, it's sad we've come to tolerate that from the world's most popular OS.
I have a Windows 11, macOS and Ubuntu Desktop VM that I alternate across throughout the week, I find I need to reset all three periodically to sort out random weirdness. It has more to do with which machine I've used most in the last few weeks not which OS is in-use in my experience.
> the world's most popular OS
Wikipedia claims that Android "has the largest installed base of any operating system in the world", if you're going to measure popularity that way.
(Of course it's hard to know how to define an OS. Is Android a kind of Linux? Are the various things called "Windows" or "MacOS" to be regarded as different versions of the same OS just because marketing people decided to use the same name? If not, how much similarity in code or design is required?)
Did the same just end of last year, NVME drive, gobs of RAM, and yet... sometimes the whole UI freezes solid for multiple seconds at a time when I close one out of my 30-40 Chrome tabs. I know it's not a cheap app to run, but this doesn't happen on MacOS.
Didn’t someone recently uncover that this was usually do to ram losing bits over time? ECC would fix it? Maybe I’m misremembering
I'd say that most PC users have vague knowledge that linux or MacOS exists.
I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.
The support pages are not for you to contact Apple. They are there for users to help other users. The cynical person would say they are there to get unpaid labor from other users so Apple can spend less on support.
If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"
This is starting to make sense. In the past I've been confused at a seemingly useful question thread there and the answer from some other user there with some like "top support user" badge or something, is just not an answer at all, and then the thread gets locked because they deemed it resolved.
The support pages are exactly this. They're called Level 0 support in most companies internally.
"Just award them with some stars or points or whatever, and they'll be happy."
I wish these people would wake up and spend their time helping peers on a forum for some open source project instead.
I've been troubleshooting this on and off since early December.
There's a handy Python script here to show log which application is stealing focus: https://superuser.com/a/874314
If you find it's SecurityAgent then you might be hitting this bug: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/807112
I suspect it's related to a JIT privilege management app my company uses.
Oh decent timing, this happened to me first time today, I even looked down at the track pad to see if my hand was close enough to accidentally swipe it because I felt it wasn't
My MacBook is corporate, and it's therefore loaded with a ton of corporate auto-update, VPN and apparently questionnaire software. Stuff pops up at the most annoying times. And sometimes, indeed it takes focus away from the thing I'm currently typing. Extremely annoying.
But apparently Apple is not the only offender. Just as I was typing this (on Harmonic on Android), a popup popped up, ate a few of the characters I typed and disappeared again. No idea what it said. Why do people do this? Don't hijack let applications I didn't ask for hijack my input.
I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.
But was the touchpad disabled at the time? Phantom touches could happen even if your hand is not near the touchpad.
Yes, there is a very large amount of software that's involved in making touchpads work and that software is part of the OS.
It's not, it's just increasingly badly made. Started creeping in the release before Sequoia
Depends on the mice. As a sibling says, Logitech mice with their drivers work great. The app isn't great and loads a boatload of javascript crap. Can't vouch for bettermouse, never tried it.
Another option which sidesteps the Logi Options crap is Logitech "gaming" mice. These have an integrated memory that actually remembers the configuration set by the driver. So, you only have to put up with the shitty experience once, and then the mouse remembers those settings wherever you use it. Some models can actually remember multiple setting sets.
One of my best mice is a G700s. I haven't used the Logitech G crap in like... ten years? The mouse is still going strong. Its only issue is that it goes through batteries like a hot knife through butter. I like it so much, I actually bought a second one for work. Got it used, since they weren't making them anymore.
Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it's absolutely true. For a very long time you couldn't even set different scroll directions for external mice and the touchpad - even if it's (maybe? I forget) supported now it's always been an area Apple didn't care about and was far behind Windows and Linux.
i have a logitech mx something and it's absolutely awesome.
the steermouse g502 combo is just incredible. been my staple for years
Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.
Agreed. Since sharing input between multiple applications (and the OS services) is its primary role, you would think that UI designers would have “thou shalt not steal focus” as a commandment, but that is not the case.
My latest version of the problem is with Ubuntu Gnome. Upgrade software and, later, you will be interrupted with a pop-up window to enter your system password. Not only is this an interruption, I’m always doubtful that this is the system asking for a sudoer password!
UIs, in my experience, are very bad at handling “interrupts”. Sorry, my dad designed chips, so I use that hardware term when talking about notifications and other times another application needs to notify or get the input from user. Personally, I’d have the UI change the color/texture of the system menubar/taskbar and wait for the user to click it.
I've been using windowed multi-tasking environments since 1986. Never been a problem for me (SunOS -> Solaris -> Linux). I rely very, very, very much on focus-follows-mouse.
You are using it wrong.
Just install the SuperTyping app. It's sooo good and intuitive. Totally worth the $189, if you consider how often you need to type something.
I also recommend Little Snitch as firewall and Parallels for virtualization.
Does anyone have a recommendation for bootloader or filesystem app? Preferably subscription model for intuitive accounting.
I have no information to add, but I also have started experiencing this after “upgrading” to Tahoe. Never was a problem before.
I looked into this and the issue is the inbuilt SecurityAgent briefly taking focus. For me I believe it’s related to some management setting our company has added not getting on with Tahoe.
Tahoe made at least one undocumented change to timer events in the GUI. This resulted in a difficult to debug problem in solvespace. I suspect we were doing something "wrong" and had to correct it, but the fact remains they made a change to how some GUI events work and didn't tell anyone.
I have experienced the same, and still have no idea what is going on.
Especially annoying when every app is likely to have single-key shortcuts which end up being accidentally triggered.
Do you have a logitech mouse? If so you need to reinstall the logi and/or G Hub apps. The cert changed and that's what's causing it to fail and keep grabbing focus away. Incredibly strange bug.
https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/37493733117847-Op...
Random possibility - if you have Bartender installed, it's buggy as shit on Tahoe, and has some really weird stuff it does with hiding the cursor and otherwise changing the focus around. I haven't switched off yet because the alternatives don't anywhere near as much functionality, but I probably will at some point soon, because while the updates have made it somewhat better it's still a pretty terrible experience at times.
Never heard of Bartender before, seems to be this:
> superpowered your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them.
Which also, for some reason has permission to record your desktop and recently had a change of owner? I'd be reformatting my computer so quickly if I found this out about software on my computer...
I replied to the parent post, but in short, I used it through a subscription service that specifically didn’t update until the ownership issues were clarified to their (and ultimately my) satisfaction.
The screen recording permissions are needed for it to be aware of when menu bar icons update so it can move them in and out of the menu bar; I believe later versions allow you to skip screen recording permissions if you’re willing to forgo that feature.
Yep, I’m aware of the (incredibly-poorly-handled) change of ownership. I’ve been using it through a SetApp[1] subscription, and they stayed on the pre-acquisition version for quite a while; long enough that enough details came out about the new owner and I felt _relatively_ okay with continuing to use it after it got updates, especially going through another party. The Tahoe issues are making me rethink that heavily now - but the alternatives I briefly looked at when I upgraded to Tahoe all seemed incredibly lacking in one way or another, and I haven’t wanted to blow up my menu bar yet again :/
[1]: https://setapp.com/
If all you need is to hide infrequently-used menu entries so they don't spill under the notch, then zNotch is a pretty good alternative.
Delinia does this currently (I don’t think the fix is public yet).
You can run a python script to track the focused window every few seconds to identify what’s stealing focus.
I updated to iPadOS 26 on my iPad Pro, opened Safari, and tried to log into a website. For some reason the full-screen keyboard didn't load, all I could get was a miniature thing that floated on the left part of the screen (like the two-handed layout but with the full keyboard in one half, like typing on an iPhone 5s).
The memes about Steve Jobs turning in his grave are true. He would not have stood for slop like this for even a moment. Apple's quality game was miles higher back in the day.
Even if they tried to do some kind of Snow Leopard maintenance release for all of their products, I don't think they could raise the bar on quality high enough in just a single release. They'd have to do it a few times with nothing new to show for it.
This speaks nothing of the transition to MacOS looking more and more like a dysfunctional toy since Jony Ive left and Alan Dye took over.
Tiger and Snow Leopard were the peak.
> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?
Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
I did the same a decade ago, and I've been fully content with my Linux-only life - but a new MacBook recently arrived along with a new job, so now I'm using Tahoe whether I like it or not. It's generally difficult to vote with someone else's wallet.
Happened to me many times. As my other colleagues, I ran a Linux VM inside macOS. The overhead is not that large and is totally worth the sanity. Of course I had to use a few corporate-managed macOS apps, like Zoom, or Outlook, but this is not a very big deal.
Well, be glad you're working for a company that is still willing to stump up properly for hardware.
Too many companies are balking at spending money on hardware right now. While I would love to think that this will drive Linux adoption, it probably won't. Microsoft is going to cave on TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 or extend Windows 10 support much further.
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to. It’s an industry-wide malaise, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s amazing that every year it becomes more and more economically nonviable for basic shit to meet the most modest standards of usability, yet we can use the power consumption of a small country to have Copilot in Notepad.
The way I see it, money can’t buy one of the most important ingredients: the motivation to do the best work of your life. No matter how much cash you throw at a problem, you’re likely just going to get people who want to "do their job" from 9 to 5. Those are exactly the kind of workers that companies like the Apple of 2026 are looking for. It’s a big ship, and it needs to stay steady and predictable. People who want to achieve something "insanely great" or "make a dent in the universe" are just a distraction.
In my experience, shipping a product as polished as Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard requires a painful level of dedication from everyone involved, not just Quality Assurance.
As long as neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal writes about how bad Apple’s software has gotten, there’s even no reason for them to think about changing their approach.
The drama surrounding Apple’s software quality isn’t showing up in their earnings. And at the end of the day, those earnings are the "high order bit," no matter what marketing tries to tell us.
Well, if there's one thing history has shown us (including the history of Apple's own insurgency against the PC), it's that complacency and stagnation make the incumbent a target for every newcomer who does have the drive to make a dent in the universe. And there are always a lot of people with that drive. This is how we keep ending up in the cycle of chaos > new paradigm > perfect software that probably should not be improved upon > collapse under weight of new features > chaos > new paradigm... repeat.
> They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to.
How?
How do you reproduce something when you have no idea of the cause and it's not happening on any of your machines?
And remember they don't have just this one unreproducible bug reported. They have thousands.
If you have experience writing software, you're going to end up with a lot of unreproducible bug reports. They're a genuine challenge for everyone, not just Apple.
Windows has had a “prevent apps from stealing focus” option for at least a decade. It was one of the things that I still dislike the most about macOS, and Apple can absolutely address this.
Windows has no such option, and regularly steals focus, particularly Visual Studio/Debug tools/applications loading. It had an option for a short period with the original TweakUI, but Microsoft removed support for it even in the registry.
No OS should steal focus, Windows absolutely is guilty of it.
How does that even work?
When you launch an application or open a dialog, you expect the new window to "steal" focus. When you close a dialog, you expect focus to go back to the main window. If it didn't, it would impair usability.
So how would an OS decide when "stealing focus" is allowed and when it is not?
Like, I'm frustrated with it too. I hate when an app pops up a dialog while I'm typing and my next keystroke dismisses it and I have no idea what I've done. But at the same time, I'd hate to have to manually switch focus to a pop-up dialog every single time before dismissing it with Enter or Escape too -- that would be way too annoying in the other direction.
Adobe programs were the worst offenders for this in my experience.
Apple has had 30 years to make UI focus and input stable, and not let something invisible steal input focus. Fortunately for mac, this is much worse on Windows.
> ... what is Apple supposed to do? ...
This seems like an example of a situation that modern machine learning could help with. Take bug reports permissively and look through all of them for patterns. Loss of focus should be the kind of thing that would stand out and could be analyzed for similarities and recurring features. Making sense of large amounts of often vague and rambling reports has been a problem for a long time and seems like a domain that machine learning is well set for.
One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?