If I clicked a link in Fedora 37 in, say, my email client or a chat window, it wouldn't immediately focus the Firefox window, and the focus would stay on whatever window I clicked the link in. This meant that if I wanted to open multiple links, I could just click them all in quick succession without needing to hop back and forth between windows.
After upgrading to Fedora 38 this behavior appears to have changed. Clicking a link will now cause the Firefox window to jump to the foreground. How might I restore the previous behavior? I found it more convenient. I'm using Gnome with a Wayland session if that makes a difference.
On Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:14:55 +0300 Matti Pulkkinen mkjpul@utu.fi wrote:
If I clicked a link in Fedora 37 in, say, my email client or a chat window, it wouldn't immediately focus the Firefox window, and the focus would stay on whatever window I clicked the link in. This meant that if I wanted to open multiple links, I could just click them all in quick succession without needing to hop back and forth between windows.
After upgrading to Fedora 38 this behavior appears to have changed. Clicking a link will now cause the Firefox window to jump to the foreground. How might I restore the previous behavior? I found it more convenient. I'm using Gnome with a Wayland session if that makes a difference.
I think this is a setting in the firefox settings. edit -> settings -> General and then look at the tabs section. You probably have this setting selected; When you open a link, image or media in a new tab, switch to it immediately
Matti Pulkkinen:
If I clicked a link in Fedora 37 in, say, my email client or a chat window, it wouldn't immediately focus the Firefox window, and the focus would stay on whatever window I clicked the link in. This meant that if I wanted to open multiple links, I could just click them all in quick succession without needing to hop back and forth between windows.
After upgrading to Fedora 38 this behavior appears to have changed. Clicking a link will now cause the Firefox window to jump to the foreground.
As far as I can recall, it's always worked in the second (annoying) fashion for me. Though I've been running Mate for many years, and am well out of touch with current Gnome's behaviour.
Opening a series of links from a common source involves an annoying amount of extra clicking, or having each window only half-screen-width and not overlapping.
stan:
I think this is a setting in the firefox settings. edit -> settings -> General and then look at the tabs section. You probably have this setting selected; When you open a link, image or media in a new tab, switch to it immediately
As far as I was aware, that would only change how clicking a link within the web-browser would work. I've always had that setting unset, and for me it only affects Firefox's internal behaviour.
I would expect there's some option in a command line to make a link open in the background, but I see nothing in the man page, and nothing jumps out at me from Firefox's about:config.
On 2023-04-19 10:40, Tim via users wrote:
Matti Pulkkinen:
If I clicked a link in Fedora 37 in, say, my email client or a chat window, it wouldn't immediately focus the Firefox window, and the focus would stay on whatever window I clicked the link in. This meant that if I wanted to open multiple links, I could just click them all in quick succession without needing to hop back and forth between windows.
After upgrading to Fedora 38 this behavior appears to have changed. Clicking a link will now cause the Firefox window to jump to the foreground.
As far as I can recall, it's always worked in the second (annoying) fashion for me. Though I've been running Mate for many years, and am well out of touch with current Gnome's behaviour.
That's funny. At some point, it switched to the other behaviour for me and has been that way for quite a while. I would prefer it to focus the Firefox window, but instead I just get a notification about Firefox opening a tab. Except, now I just tested it on this laptop and it does switch to Firefox right away, so I have no idea what the difference is, other than maybe this laptop is a recent install, unlike the others.
Hello,
On Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:00:24 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 2023-04-19 10:40, Tim via users wrote:
Matti Pulkkinen:
If I clicked a link in Fedora 37 in, say, my email client or a chat window, it wouldn't immediately focus the Firefox window, and the focus would stay on whatever window I clicked the link in. This meant that if I wanted to open multiple links, I could just click them all in quick succession without needing to hop back and forth between windows.
After upgrading to Fedora 38 this behavior appears to have changed. Clicking a link will now cause the Firefox window to jump to the foreground.
As far as I can recall, it's always worked in the second (annoying) fashion for me. Though I've been running Mate for many years, and am well out of touch with current Gnome's behaviour.
That's funny. At some point, it switched to the other behaviour for me and has been that way for quite a while. I would prefer it to focus the Firefox window, but instead I just get a notification about Firefox opening a tab. Except, now I just tested it on this laptop and it does switch to Firefox right away, so I have no idea what the difference is, other than maybe this laptop is a recent install, unlike the others.
One could also set firefox's window (or the other target app) to be always on top or to be in another focus mode, handled by the window manager - at least when being in mode "multi-click", that might help. Mate users can do that easily, devilspie may help as well.
Regards,
On Wed, 2023-04-19 at 20:51 +0200, wwp wrote:
One could also set firefox's window (or the other target app) to be always on top or to be in another focus mode, handled by the window manager - at least when being in mode "multi-click", that might help. Mate users can do that easily, devilspie may help as well.
Do tell... "what's multi-click"? I use Mate, I haven't found anything that I could twiddle with to control this behaviour.
Hello Tim,
On Thu, 20 Apr 2023 12:51:45 +0930 Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, 2023-04-19 at 20:51 +0200, wwp wrote:
One could also set firefox's window (or the other target app) to be always on top or to be in another focus mode, handled by the window manager - at least when being in mode "multi-click", that might help. Mate users can do that easily, devilspie may help as well.
Do tell... "what's multi-click"? I use Mate, I haven't found anything that I could twiddle with to control this behaviour.
Well, I meant when you need to click on several links that will open another app (or the opposite, need to open several links in firefox, by clicking several times in another app). My point was to use the always-on-top window property, whatever you set it to firefox or the other app, so that you don't have to switch apps between all clicks and set focus back to the former app, but I think I completely misunderstood Matti's original post, sorry!
Regards,
Tim:
Do tell... "what's multi-click"? I use Mate, I haven't found anything that I could twiddle with to control this behaviour.
wwp:
Well, I meant when you need to click on several links that will open another app (or the opposite, need to open several links in firefox, by clicking several times in another app). My point was to use the always-on-top window property, whatever you set it to firefox or the other app, so that you don't have to switch apps between all clicks and set focus back to the former app
Ah, yes. I've done that plenty of times, but then you have to undo it again afterwards. Sometimes the simplest solution is to just have the two windows side by side, without overlapping the bits you want to read. But that's really only practical on wide screens, or you end up in a situation like trying to read a magazine though a keyhole.
It's a shame there isn't some *easy* way to open the link in the background from an external app (such as your email client). Within Firefox, simply using the middle mouse button does that.
On Wed, 2023-04-19 at 11:00 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
instead I just get a notification about Firefox opening a tab.
That's exactly how it worked for me before I upgraded to F38, notification and everything, and I actually much preferred that behavior.
Except, now I just tested it on this laptop and it does switch to Firefox right away, so I have no idea what the difference is, other than maybe this laptop is a recent install, unlike the others.
Which version of Fedora do you have on that laptop?
On Thu, 20 Apr 2023 03:10:47 +0930 Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
stan:
I think this is a setting in the firefox settings. edit -> settings -> General and then look at the tabs section. You probably have this setting selected; When you open a link, image or media in a new tab, switch to it immediately
As far as I was aware, that would only change how clicking a link within the web-browser would work. I've always had that setting unset, and for me it only affects Firefox's internal behaviour. I would expect there's some option in a command line to make a link open in the background, but I see nothing in the man page, and nothing jumps out at me from Firefox's about:config.
I did a search on this, and found this link, https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/links-open-background-firefox-chrome/ Warning, it is old, but the setting still exists. It describes such links as diverted links, and there is a setting in the about:config for that. Mine is set to false, but still doesn't change the behavior for me. The caveat is that once this is set, according to the article, even links opened in the browser will be in the background. That's what I want, but someone else might not.
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground false
If this doesn't work, trying safe-mode, /usr/bin/firefox --safe-mode to disable all addons to see if that is a cause. Or /usr/bin/firefox --new-instance --Profile-Manager to set up a completely new test profile.
I also have my browser in its own workspace, so that might be why. And I am running X with lxqt or lxde, another big difference. Yet more, I'm running the latest alpha of firefox, nightly. All in all, I might not be a good candidate for investigating this.
On Thu, 2023-04-20 at 09:34 -0700, stan via users wrote:
I did a search on this, and found this link, https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/links-open-background-firefox-chrome/ Warning, it is old, but the setting still exists. It describes such links as diverted links, and there is a setting in the about:config for that. Mine is set to false, but still doesn't change the behavior for me. The caveat is that once this is set, according to the article, even links opened in the browser will be in the background. That's what I want, but someone else might not.
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground false
This actually does give me similar behavior to what I'm looking for, at least based on quick testing. I don't think I had this enabled before, because enabling this doesn't show me a desktop notification every time I click a link, which is different from before. I also don't remember ever enabling this before. Either way I'll enable this and see what happens. Thanks!
On Thu, 2023-04-20 at 09:34 -0700, stan via users wrote:
I did a search on this, and found this link, https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/links-open-background-firefox-chrome/ Warning, it is old, but the setting still exists. It describes such links as diverted links, and there is a setting in the about:config for that. Mine is set to false, but still doesn't change the behavior for me. The caveat is that once this is set, according to the article, even links opened in the browser will be in the background. That's what I want, but someone else might not.
Excellent, works here.
Once I changed a divert about:config setting (*) to true, when I click a link in Evolution, Firefox (now) will open that link in the background, in a new tab.
"browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground"
I just searched about:config for divert.
The first time a link opens the browser, it does pop to the foreground. But once Firefox is running, subsequent links load in the background.
I'm running the Mate spin of Fedora 36, here, with very little customisation of the default install.
On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 10:14:55AM +0300, Matti Pulkkinen wrote:
If I clicked a link in Fedora 37 in, say, my email client or a chat window, it wouldn't immediately focus the Firefox window, and the focus would stay on whatever window I clicked the link in. This meant that if I wanted to open multiple links, I could just click them all in quick succession without needing to hop back and forth between windows.
After upgrading to Fedora 38 this behavior appears to have changed. Clicking a link will now cause the Firefox window to jump to the foreground. How might I restore the previous behavior? I found it more convenient. I'm using Gnome with a Wayland session if that makes a difference.
For a similar problem this seemed to work for me, in "about:config", set the following to TRUE:
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground
HTH
-
Jon LaBadie -
Matti Pulkkinen -
Samuel Sieb -
stan -
Tim -
wwp