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Question

How to prevent Adobe software stealing focus in Windows 10? - LOCKED

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
November 9, 2015
35 replies
32037 views

Every Adobe app (InDesign, Photoshop...) is stealing the focus from other application a several times. This behaviour is annoying as well as useless. How to stop this?

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MajesticWolf

Participating Frequently

To all those people who love to keep repeating: "Just leave it alone and let it open" - what kind of slow-paced, Sunday driver, bunny rabbit meadow of a workplace do you work at where every time someone opens up a program you have all the time in the world to put your mouse away, pencils down, and take a stroll down to the lake?

...but it all seriousness. It's actually rather obtuse to suggest ignoring the issue. It would be like a doctor telling a patient who has a sore leg: "Walk more on the other leg".

Problem 1: Regardless of how fast computers are getting, every new version of Photoshop almost doubles it's load time. Perhaps Adobe can look into reducing the amount of time spent "Initially initializing the initialization initializers".

Problem 2: Knowing that problem 1 won't be resolved any time soon, in order to keep a creative flow many designers are happy to open a program and do other tasks while it loads. This could be (but not limited to): responding to emails, searching for the source materials they need for the pending Photoshop task, browsing online content, etc. By repeatedly stealing focus, you are preventing anybody from doing productive work on the computer while the software loads.

Yes these are issues. No, we don't want to accept a "solution" that means turning the other cheek. I'm glad Adobe is aware of the issue (and is apparently working on it), but don't devalue our concerns with such obtuse responses.

BobLevine

Community Expert

As already pointed out, it will get fixed when it gets fixed.

Complaining about 10 seconds of your life being stolen from you is not going to change anything or get the problem fixed any faster. Is it a PITA when you launch the applications? Yes. Launch the programs and leave them open. That will prevent the horrible inconvenience you’re experiencing.

Oh, and I feel sorry for anyone with a machine so slow that they can answer an email in the time that ANY application is launching.

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MajesticWolf

Participating Frequently

BobLevine wrote
As already pointed out, it will get fixed when it gets fixed.

Well aware of this, thanks Bob. As clearly indicated in the last paragraph of my post.

BobLevine wrote
Complaining about 10 seconds of your life being stolen from you is not going to change anything or get the problem fixed any faster.

Not the point here... if it were not for folks like me adding their $0.02 to the discussion, and providing an insight into their frustrations, these issues would rarely be brought to light. Granted: my original post had it's fair share of light-hearted humor based hyperbole, your arrogance here is actually quite appalling. I know you don't work for Adobe, but being an "MVP" you should really understand where we are coming from and learn how to add to this discussions constructively.

BobLevine wrote
Oh, and I feel sorry for anyone with a machine so slow that they can answer an email in the time that ANY application is launching.

Really? Once again, what an appalling and juvenile thing to say. And for your information: I'm running and 8 core, 16-thread i7 with 64GB of RAM and an M.2 PCIe SSD (which transfers data at over 3.6GB/sec). And yes, every new version of Photoshop takes longer and longer to load. Try again Bob.

Steve Werner

Community Expert

If you read through the thread you'll see that Adobe engineers are aware of the issue and are working on it

Eduard Shcherbanev

Participant

The engineers are ostensibly working on it. There is unfortunately no evidence of it.

Steve Werner

Community Expert

You don't have a very good understanding of the way software engineering works. When a problem is determined to occur, it takes extensive testing to make sure that a "fix" doesn't adversely affect other parts of the software. This is particularly difficult when you have very large software (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) which operate on a large variety of hardware and which interact with a large variety of third party software. You'll just have to wait, I'm afraid.

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matthewh26

Participant

This issue has been bugging me for a long time, so I finally decided to do a search and find a solution. This is the first thread I came across, and it appears 2 years after the original post, the focus stealing is still an issue.

Even with a new Kaby Lake i7 7700, 16gb RAM and Creative Cloud apps installed on an SSD drive, PS still takes time to load while constantly stealing focus. While yes, it's not a huge amount of time, it is still frustrating nonetheless.

Glad to see it's not only me.

use3982stock

Participating Frequently

As a former programmer, I can tell you that this was done on purpose. Back in Win95, there was a single call something like getfocus() and the app comes to the top. People abused it and by year 2000 windows no longer let apps come to top but just flashed the taskbar when that was called. Remember WinXP where the taskbar buttons flash orange?

Then later dodgy operators use stayontop() on and off and a bunch of other calls to simulate activating the window. It was done by MS office even. Then by around 2005 it was considered lame and rude to the user to do this. MS kept adding new things to prevent programs from taking focus so rudely in each version of windows.

Fast forward to 10 years ago in 2007 I don't think a single major software brand tried to annoy users anymore like this. Even splash screens, which used to be stayontop were not anymore. Even the old PS and LR didn't steal focus as I remember.

So I only started using CC in 2015, and it's really annoying. I can tell you for a fact that the engineers are NOT working on the issue. In fact the engineers have worked VERY HARD to be able to steal focus. Not only once, but 4-5 times during startup. It's not an accident, they HAD TO CALL THEIR MAGIC CODE EACH TIME to steal focus.

If they wanted they'd take 5 lines of code out. It would take one global search and maybe 30s of time.

----------SUMMARY--------

PROGRAMS DO NOT ACCIDENTALLY STEAL FOCUS. They work hard to get it (stealing focus) to work. Even MS office, with all access to secret windows libraries do NOT steal focus. Adobe is the ONLY major company now that loves stealing focus, not only that, 5 times for 20s it takes to load up everything.

Shame on you adobe.

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umpfgrmblAuthor

Known Participant

That is exactly what I (programmer too) think! Thank you for the words...

DieterDubai

Participant

I have windows 10 running but do not experience this , are you short in RAM or swap HDD or do you have a virus ?

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Artem Russakovskii

Participating Frequently

I'm experiencing this issue with Windows 10 and Photoshop CC 2017.0.1. It's is absolutely infuriating. The PC is relatively fast (Skylake, 32GB of RAM), yet Photoshop takes 10+s to start, and during this time it steals focus from any other window, immediately popping up in its place.

FIX IT, Adobe!

Steve Werner

Community Expert

This is the InDesign forum. Please post in the Photoshop forum.

Time to switch to a Mac? [ducking and running]

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Artem Russakovskii

Participating Frequently

It seems to affect the whole suite, not just Photoshop.

I did find the following helpful links:

Photoshop: When launching Photoshop it recurringly takes focus from another application/task (Windows) | Photoshop Famil…

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2249998

So Adobe is at least aware and working on a fix.

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nssignarama

Participant

I'm experiencing the same issue since upgrading to a new computer with Windows 10 and upgrading to Photoshop 2017. Every time I start Photoshop, once it's nearly done loading it steals the focus 5-6 times while I keep trying to Alt-Tab back to whatever other app I'm trying to use. I don't recall experiencing this on the old Windows 7 PC with older CC versions.