Prevent windows from stealing focus

Software developers regularly issue patches for their programs, one of which may have been to stop the program from stealing focus. Check the program's options for settings that may be causing the focus stealing, and disable them.

A software maker may see a full screen switch to his or her program as an "alert" feature that you want, but you see it as an unwelcome interruption.

Contact the software maker and let them know that their program is stealing focus. Give as much information as you can about the situation s where this occurs and ask if they have a fix.

Read through our How to Talk to Tech Support for help properly communicating the problem. Last, but not least, you can always try a third-party, anti-focus-stealing tool, of which there are a few:.

Windows should now stop stealing focus while you're not using them. As mentioned at the start of this piece, Windows XP actually allowed for focus stealing if one specific value in the Windows Registry was set in a specific way. Following the short tutorial below, you can manually change that value to the one that prevents programs from stealing focus in Windows XP.

Changes to the Windows Registry are made in these steps. Take great care in making only the changes described below. It's recommended that you back up the registry keys you're modifying in these steps as an extra precaution.

Open Registry Editor. Select the Desktop key under Control Panel. Those are zeros in that value, not 'o' letters. Hexadecimal doesn't include the letter o and so they wouldn't be accepted, but it should be mentioned nonetheless. Select OK and then close Registry Editor. Restart your computer so the changes you made can take effect. From this point forward, programs you run in Windows XP should no longer steal the focus from the window that you're currently working in.

Enter your email below to get exclusive access to our best articles and tips before everybody else. Hi, as stated in the subject, I wonder how to prevent windows from stealing focus from whatever your working on whenever some other running app, howvever unimportant, calls for attention? This focus-stealing drives me up a wall, and it's not helpful at all for keeping ones train-of-thought when, for instance, writing a mail. Thankful for suggestions! Fade Inactive Windows to Transparent.

LH: Not really sure what you mean. Please can you give an example. Improve this question. Jason Jason 3, 11 11 gold badges 45 45 silver badges 77 77 bronze badges. There are many 3rd party program that could provide us with this ability, here a link to another forum that explain it tenforums. Here some of it Actual Windows Manager actualtools.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Recent Windows 10 versions have the magic value of in ForegroundLockTimeout , but I don't really see any difference in behaviour. It's already 0xd Doesn't work, sadly enough. I'm not sure this actually was in XP but it definitely was in W2k. I remember being upset when this setting stopped working.

Barleyman Barleyman 2 2 gold badges 4 4 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. Not an IT pro? Resources for IT Professionals. Sign in. United States English. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. Archived Forums. Windows 10 General. Sign in to vote. Is there any way to stop applications from stealing focus? Some other app steals focus after I complete my first word, but I carry on typing.

My entire message after the first word is lost since I cant touch type and I was typing into some modal window : Am I the only one endlessly annoyed by windows just allowing any old app to steal focus while users are actively interacting with applications?

Monday, February 29, PM. Tuesday, March 1, AM. That is no solution. The onus should be on Windows, not on the user, to prevent badly-behaving applications from stealing window activation away from the user. Monday, July 4, PM. The only real solution would be logic built into the OS to prohibit an application from stealing activation away from the one the user is actually working with.

Thursday, July 21, PM. Thursday, August 25, AM. I have the same issue. It's so god damned annoying. Firefox does it a lot as well. Makes having mutli monitors with multiple different windows open useless. I wish there was a damn fix. Wednesday, August 31, PM. ZigZagx People shouldn't have to go looking for it themselves if they have already found this thread and want to sign the petition. The name of the petition is Stop Focus Stealing!

Wednesday, November 2, AM. Exactly same problem. I am very surprised it was not solved yet. May we have the Microsoft position on this? Regards, Roman. Saturday, December 24, AM. The finally drove me nuts tonight while I was trying to watch the Alien : Covenant trailer. Before pressing play I went to launch Photoshop to do some work. While i was watching the trailer, Photoshop kept popping up to the front. But it happens a LOT. I often switch programs and close the ones I'm not using to try to help system performance.

Then while working on something I'll have a need for another program so I'll load it and go back to what I was doing while it loads. I'm usually met with minor frustration at focus from what I'm doing being directed at the newly loading application. Today I'd had enough and now I want this behavior stopped.

There HAS to be a way to load a program in the background so it doesn't interfere with what I'm currently doing. Wednesday, March 1, AM. I'd add that it's not just when typing something per your two scenarios. I'm trying to copy files by right-click or dragging and the other program steals focus then the files are trying to open or copy into the opening app This must be stopped!!

Friday, March 10, PM. I'll lay out a couple of workflow examples to illustrate: When I'm writing an email while photoshop starts in the another process, I don't want photoshop to steal focus from my email client.

That won't help for the special case of launching applications from explorer. The app windows are not child windows of explorer.