RFE: Never, ever steal focus.

[Zing]

On Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:59:14 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 16:00 +0100, nodata wrote:
>> I'd like to suggest an enhancement for Fedora 13: nothing should ever
>> steal focus from the window I am typing in. If I am typing in a shell
>> window, or in a word processor, or an e-mail, nothing should ever take
>> keyboard focus away from that window.
>> 
>> Clearly I'm missing something, otherwise we would have this, hence the
>> posting to the list :)
> 
> I'm not sure what you are missing, but I know what I'm missing here - a
> description of when exactly focus was stolen from you that was a
> problem.
> 
> In almost all cases, if you are typing into one application in Fedora,
> and a window pops up from another application and steals away your
> focus, and your typing goes to the wrong place, that's a bug that should
> be filed against one of:
> 
>  - The application that popped up a window - The application that you
>  are typing into - The window manager
> 
> With the most likely candidate being the first one. If you run into such
> problems and you are using GNOME with Metacity (or gnome-shell and
> Mutter), please feel free to file bugs against Metacity and I'll help
> you figure out where they should be reassigned.
> 
> There are also a number of GConf options for Metacity that can be set to
> modify the exact behavior; these are mostly, however, intended as
> workarounds for people using closed source applications that can't be
> fixed properly. When all the applications are under our control, it
> should "just work".

Would you (or someone) mind explaining why the following happens and how I 
could get pre-F12 behaviour?:

In Fedora 12,
1. start seamonkey
2. start gnome-terminal (be on top of seamonkey window)
3. $ seamonkey -remote "openurl(http://lwn.net,new-tab)"
4. seamonkey pops in front and steals focus.

This used to just load the page in the background without stealing focus.  
It seems like there are a myriad of confusing ways this can happen and a 
several options to mitigate it... but I'm lost.