Comment 15 for bug 546969

Update for people like me who like to understand what the #$& is actually going on:

Sometime in the last two years this problem went away for me. Then just the other day it mysteriously came back. After lots of reading I finally got it how I like it again, and learned that there have been multiple levels of bugs and settings making this extra confusing:

1. A <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721498">FireFox bug</a> causing inconsistent behavior with links passed from external apps. This is what caused my original problem: if FF was not open yet, external links would focus it, but if FF was already open, external links would not focus it. As noted in that bug report, that doesn't make sense whatever your general focus preference is, and this was fixed in early 2012 so that FF DOES take focus in either case. Which made people like me happy, who prefer to always open external links in the foreground, but annoyed the people who prefer to always open external links in the background.

2. The <a href="http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-stop-firefox-stealing-window-focus.htm">Focus Prevention Level</a> compiz setting. People who were upset by the FF fix can use this setting to override what they (erroneously IMO) call FF's "focus stealing". Set it to at least "low" and it should block FF from taking focus, instead bouncing the icon in the launcher or flashing in the taskbar or whatever. Or, if you WANT FF to take focus when you click links from external apps, set this to "off". Back when I posted to this case in 2010 this fix did not help me, but now that the FF bug is fixed, it does.

3. The FF config setting browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground -- This gets brought up a lot but it is NOT RELEVANT to this issue. This setting (and the similar LoadInBackground) controls how tabs focus in relation to other tabs, not how FF focuses in relation to other apps. Everyone that's been talking about these settings has just been obscuring the actual problem and complicating the discussion.

There, hope this helps at least one person, and I will now shut up about it forever :)