Comment 16 for bug 1009816

I agree that the old behaviour was more likeable.

Funnily enough if you set browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to true the Firefox window doesn't get focused / jump to the foreground anymore and doing this is therefore brought up as a solution to the problem everywhere. However this doesn't actually seem to be what this property is about - what the property seems to be supposed to do is to open that link (in this case from an external program) in a background tab. The fact that this doesn't focus Firefox is just a side-effect.

But opening links from external programs in background tabs is not what I want because that means that if I have loads of tabs open with, say, the first one active, and I then click on a link from an external application and later switch to Firefox, I still have to scroll to the tab I just opened.

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-ppa-bugs/+bug/703806 which seems to have made this workaround possible.