How Prevent External Browser from Gaining Focus?

[88mm]

I am using the lite version of RSS Guard and have a key (space) assigned to "Open selected source articles in external browser". This works. How do I prevent the focus from shifting to the external web browser (Firefox)?

I wish to have RSS Guard open each selected article in a new tab in Firefox, which RSS Guard does, but NOT switch the focus to the external web browser each time I "select" an article in RSS Guard. (I typically want to send several articles to the external web browser and then read them when I am finished with RSS Guard.)

[martinrotter]

Hello.

@88mm When you launch firefox (or any other program), then it is brought to foreground (given focus) almost in every case, this is sadly the feature of windowing system (same thing happens on Linux and on Windows).

That said, you might check out https://superuser.com/questions/1346935/how-to-actually-start-program-minimized-in-windows-10

Firefox, specifically, should have command line parameter -silent which could help. It should automagically start firefox minimized, perhaps something like firefox.exe -silent <URL> could work.

[88mm]

martinrotter, thank you for the suggestion. I will try the "-silent" switch today in the RSS Guard custom external web browser executable parameters.
I guess I should have mentioned that I am using Linux. (I figure there is some way to do this as the previous RSS reader I was using, quiterss, pulled firefox into the foreground for about one second then quiterss popped back on top.)

[88mm]

"--silent" did not work. Adding it had no effect. However, below is a Firefox configuration change that keeps Firefox from gaining the focus when RSS Guard or any other application sends it a URL.

In Firefox's about:config change browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to True.

[martinrotter]

I see, I tested it on Windows. Yes, you are right, on Linux (preferably under X11), there is a couple of better ways to actually bring window to foreground but I will also test again on Windows.

[martinrotter]

It seem they use this to bring app window back to front after the tool is executed:

https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss/blob/4bd7f02379572a5942b318e2a83e2079a8330f42/src/application/mainwindow.cpp#L244

[martinrotter]

Btw, on Windows: "An application cannot force a window to the foreground while the user is working with another window. Instead, Windows flashes the taskbar button of the window to notify the user." (from microsoft docs)

I will add this feature for Linux and other OSES.

[martinrotter]

OK, I think I fixed it for all platforms: 902570a

Note that this feature will only work if you use "Open selected source articles in external browser" action. I did not enable new behavior for "external tools" because usually when users use custom external tools, they actually do want to bring external tool window to front, not RSS Guard.

Pls test with development build once it gets builded and let me know.