Switch of focus

[Rodion Romanovich]

Sometimes when opening several apps simultaneously as working, the OS switches to the window of the just loaded application when it finishes loading instead of staying with the application I chose to have active before. This is really annoying. Is there any way to turn that off in Windows XP?

[Whacker]

No, because that's simply the way the OS works. If you rapidly open say, Firefox, Word, Excel, then Powerpoint from the taskbar, yet you want Firefox to remain up, it's not going to happen. As the OS loads each app, it will bring each one to the front in the order you selected.

[Rodion Romanovich]

Ok, thanks for the reply. Too bad, it's sometimes quite annoying, when you open one window and start writing a post or typing in an url, then it switches to the 2nd browser window which gets loaded a second later... I think I'll have to learn using browser tabs instead of new windows, at least that'll solve the problem for browsing.

[Whacker]

Think about it this way. Say you opened each of those 4 apps 5 minutes apart. First Firefox which comes to the forefront, work for 5 min, then Word which also gains focus, work for 5 min, etc etc. Now shorten the 5 minutes to 5 seconds. No difference, just timing. If you're running into really big issues with lag and load times and have a real need, consider getting a faster rig.

[Ramses II CP]

In IE and Firefox control clicking a link opens it in a new tab without switching. So if I'm viewing a forum and I want to read 6 posts I control click the first five, popping five new tabs without changing focus, and click the last one.

Very convenient. Control tab switches between the tabs, so you don't have to mouse at all. Tabbed browsing is highly recommended.

Obviously this is not helpful when you're launching multiple applications.