Comment by crazygringo

Comment by crazygringo 2 days ago

23 replies

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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.

eloisius 2 days ago

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.

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  • crena a day ago

    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.

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    • noduerme a day ago

      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.

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  • crazygringo a day ago

    > 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.

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JoBrad 2 days ago

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.

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  • Someone1234 2 days ago

    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.

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    • AnyTimeTraveler 2 days ago

      Many Linux display managers let you chose what to do, when a window requests focus. For me on Sway, it just turns the border red.

      I chose what happens after. Can recommend. I wasn't even aware of my privilege.

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    • kevin_thibedeau a day ago

      I've found that the login dialog in Win 11 no longer consistently takes focus on the password field. Really annoying to login blind and find your typing was rejected because it doesn't do the sensible thing any more.

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      • efreak a day ago

        When I hit Win+L to lock my screen and come back 4 hours later to input my pin, I turn on my monitor (that I turned off because every 5 minutes Windows turns it on and off again), push esc or Ctrl a few times to clear off the image, and start typing in my PIN. 90% of the time by the time my monitor displays the picture, it's sitting at the unlock screen with the last 2 digits of my 4-digit PIN

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    • pixelpoet 2 days ago

      Windows itself isn't guilty of this in my experience (lifetime of use until Linux switch last year), but other apps like shitty Akamai. Some years ago a coworker wrote this blog post and a simple tool to find out which programs are doing it: https://forwardscattering.org/post/30

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      • Someone1234 2 days ago

        Windows is absolutely guilty of this, and it is trivial to reproduce.

        Reproduction steps:

        - Start a reply to this comment in your browser, type some example words.

        - Create a BAT file with the following contents:

                 @echo off
         timeout /t 15 /nobreak >nul       
         start notepad.exe         

  - Run the BAT file.   

  - Immediately switch back to the browser tab, and place your focus into the HN reply box. Type a word. 

  - Wait for notepad to open   

  - Continue typing. Your typing will go into Notepad and not the browser tab you had focused last.
        This occurs commonly and continuously on Windows, it is damn obnoxious. The OS should never ever change focus, it should however flash the window/taskbar, that is acceptable, but not shift my typing into whatever arbitrary program opened. This used to be fixable via "ForegroundLockTimeout" which is what classic TweakUI altered, but was killed in Vista.

        If you're a Visual Studio user, it is a daily annoyance. You hit Start/Play, go about your work, and then suddenly some time later focus shifts out from under you.

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        • paulmooreparks a day ago

          I'm running Windows (25H2, 26200.7462). I used the batch file you pasted and tried your repro steps, multiple times (I started writing this comment, in fact). It didn't steal focus. (Edit: See below). I'm quite sure that I haven't had a steal-focus issue at the OS level for many years, and I use Windows all day, every day. I'm also a Visual Studio user.

          Edit: I tried it with Firefox and got a repro there. No stealing with Edge.

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      • nottorp a day ago

        Why does a window manager allow applications to steal focus?

        Focus should change only in response to user commands.

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  • jdiff 2 days ago

    Where's that hiding? Discord is horrifically guilty of this across every OS, so I'd love a way to quash that on at least one.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • WD-42 2 days ago

      GNOME on Linux prevents it. You get a notification "Discord updater is ready" instead which you can activate if you want to give it focus - which I never do. F the Discord updater.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • crazygringo a day ago

    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.

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tw04 2 days ago

I can tell you bartender 6 has been perpetually broken since release and does this. I finally gave up on it after the devs sent me “fixes” that never fixed anything.

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nazgul17 2 days ago

Dunno, not deleting the posts would be a good start.

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  • iLemming 19 hours ago

    Exactly. They're just acting like Trump during the pandemic - "no testing - no cases..." Why not just keep the posts and allow people exchange ideas for workarounds?

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materialpoint a day ago

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.

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Garlef a day ago

> If it's affecting only a tiny number of users

Tiny number of users with such an enormous user base (10-16% desktop share) still means there's thousands of users affected.

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m0llusk 2 days ago

> ... 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.

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