Bug 7747 – REGRESSION: Background tab/window auto-refresh in GMail will take focus.

• Component: DOM
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Adele Peterson]

This is not the same bug as http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=WebKit
"gmail website steals tab focus".

This behavior has changed recently.

It used to be that if you started to load GMail, and then went to another tab, that when it finished loading, GMail would take the focus (by calling window.focus).  This is definitely different from Firefox but not nearly as annoying as the new behavior.

Now, when GMail does refresh loads in a background tab or window, it also steals focus.  So you can leave the tab/window after its fully loaded, go to another tab and do something else for a minute, and as the refresh in the GMail tab/window occurs, the focus will change out from under you.

This does not occur in Safari 2.0.3.

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> This is not the same bug as
> http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=WebKit
> "gmail website steals tab focus".

That would be Bug 3779. :)

[Adele Peterson]

This regression occurred between r13256 and r13261

[Darin Adler]

All the changes between those versions were things I did. Two bugs I fixed were bug 3308 and bug 7422 Here's a guess:

It's possible this regression occurred because I fixed window.open() to properly find existing frames by name. Perhaps GMail calls focus() on a frame, but before it was having difficulty finding the frame. Thus I could have made the symptom of bug 3779 worse by fixing a bug in window.open(). If so, then it means the behavior before might have been better when pop-up blocking was enabled.

Some ways to test this theory would be: 1) to change KJS::WindowFunc::callAsFunction to call tree()->child() instead of tree()->find() in the one place at the start related to pop-up blocking or 2) to test older versions of Safari with pop-up blocking turned off.

[Jon]

I'm seeing this bug in a broader context. For example, at the Ars forums, clicking a link for a forum or topic will result in focus being shifting to the last tab or window in the order stack. So, open the Ars forums in a tab and then open another tab or window, which can have anything in it. Then go back to the Ars tab and click a forum or topic link. The view should switch to the new tab or window. 

Also, I've narrowed this down to the 13258 change as being the first version that will display this bug. 13257 doesn't build and 256 doesn't have this bug.

I also think the severity of this bug should be increased since it affects multiple sites whenever you have multiple tabs or windows open.

[Geoffrey Garen]

Bumping to major.

[Alice Liu]

<rdar://problem/4481594>

*** Bug 7915 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Created attachment 7236 [details]
Reduction

The problem seems to be very simple: FrameTree::find() does not match the null name with a frame that has a name. I think it should do just that.

Created attachment 7237 [details]
Reduction

Corrected link text.

Created attachment 7238 [details]
Patch

[Adele Peterson]

Comment on attachment 7238 [details]
Patch

nice work, mitz! r=me.

*** Bug 7920 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***