GNOME and focus stealing

[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 15:48 -0700, der.hans wrote:
> That's Evolution passing focus rather than focus stealing. Is there a way
> for Evolution to say "if I have focus when seahorse pops up, please pass
> that focus on to seahorse for me"?

That would be nice, but the only ways that I know are hackish.

> If, however, you hit <ctrl>-<enter> and then move to another application
> before seahorse starts up, then seahorse should not get the focus
> automagically.

Yes, ideally.  I think that most window managers accomplish something
similar by putting child windows on the same desktop as their parents,
and then you can't have focus on an inactive desktop.

> > In reality, X allows for this focus stealing in numerous cases.  One
> 
> Bad X, bad, bad.  :)
> 
> > would have to violate the X11 specification to disallow it.  It's also
> > possible to put a full screen event mask in place to do key logging.  If
> 
> A key logger is yet another security reason for being able to control
> what application has the focus.

The point I was trying to make here is that focus doesn't really matter.
If you're relying on focus that's a false sense of security.  Perhaps a
practical one, but not truly secure in the sense that you're complaining
about :)

> > you're running X, at some level you're putting trust in a bunch of
> > applications doing the right thing :)
> 
> Those running KDE claim it all works correctly under KDE. Is that just
> because KDE requires better behavior from KDE applications?
> 
> > You might be interested in the NSA's X security extensions.  I don't
> > think that anyone's implemented them yet though.
> 
> I'll just switch to KDE next time I restart X. I'm installing a new laptop
> this weekend, guess I'll go with Kubuntu on it.

I haven't run KDE in a long time, but I'd be surprised if they did this
differently.  Report back.

		--Ted

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