Comment 18 for bug 129396

Could this be upgraded from wishlist? It is quite annoying.

Every new window created from an active window (ie not from a menu or panel button) is started in the background. This include child windows of active apps. This is happening to me now under both Gnome and KDE sessions when using compiz.

Examples:
+ Run gvim (or file-roller, or gnome-about) from gnome-terminal, the new app appears in the background and gnome-terminal retains the focus. Using the app switcher demonstrates that the new app appears in the app-list immediately *before* the gnome-terminal.
+ While running Thunderbird, click reply to an email, and the compose window appears in the background. In this case, the compose window *does* get the focus, and using the app switcher demonstrates that the window manager thinks its the active window.
- Starting a new window with firefox, gnome-terminal *does* work as it should (new window in foreground, with the focus), so the second example could conceivably be thunderbird bug, it didn't show itself back under kwin.