When opening a second window, Firefox switches me back to the first one and it's driving me crazy. Why is this happening?
When running firefox with 2 or more windows, after certain operations (not sure if it's a POST or another operation), it will quickly switch me over to the other firefox window. This is extremely annoying. I would have thought that the problem would have been fixed by now, as I was just updated to Firefox 21.0, but no such luck.
The problem has existed for almost 9 months, here is an earlier thread that describes the problem, and one workaround - supposedly - is to disable Flash Player Protected Mode ...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/938033?page=3
I will be quite surprised if I find out that this works (just disabled it moments ago), because I am running Flashblock 1.5.7, and so practically none of my flash objects are ever activated to begin with, so it's quite surprising that Firefox can be manipulated by a program that is supposedly, not even running at all.
The procedure to disable Flash Player protected mode is at the bottom of the page here :
Modified by systemBuilder
All Replies (7)
You are running two FX instances next to each other? Could it be, that you are running them as one and the same user, i.e. using the same profile?
see:
Profiles - Where Firefox stores your bookmarks, passwords and other user data
There's a good chance this is the bug that kicks in when you do not have Flash running in any tab and you open a new window to a page that does use Flash. Some updated details can be found in this recent thread: Opening New Windows and Shockwave Flash.
By the way, if you check your FlashBlock settings, have you approved any sites to always run Flash? This may sounds strange, but the last time I checked, Google Analytics runs Flash when it is capturing information about your browser. (I always disable that when I set up GA on a site.)
I have seen answers that attempt to *explain* this behavior, but quite frankly, there is no *excuse* for this grievous user-interface error. I've been using windowing workstations since just about the dawn of time (1980), and in NO CASE is it acceptable for the windows of an application to spontaneously rearrange their stack ranking without direct manipulation from the user/mouse. NONE.
So I appreciate your workaround suggestions, but this is a grievous bug in firefox, plain and simple.
Hi systemBuilder, you are not alone in your frustration. The problem is the plugin model: plugins are allowed to do much more than they can be trusted to do intelligently. Without a change to that, Firefox cannot stop the Flash player from changing window focus.
The Flash plugin runs at the pleasure of the Firefox browser. The firefox browser used to be able to mediate errant behavior (window topping, popups opening, etc.) in javascript and in other languages that run at the pleasure of firefox. The onus is on Firefox to either make the flash player behave, or otherwise, to reimplement that functionality so the flash virus can harm firefox no further ...
Hi systemBuilder, perhaps someday we will see that, or much more drastic changes to support for binary plugins. (Those are handled completely differently than normal in-page scripts.) I haven't searched around amongst the many blogs, wikis, bugs and roadmaps on mozilla.org to know whether you could hope for it in the next year or two or three. All I can say for sure is that with respect to this specific Flash-changing-window-focus problem, I have not seen anyone seriously working on changing Firefox to work around it. By "seriously" I mean posting a proposed patch.