Comment 12 for bug 584513

After some extensive searching, I've concluded that this is probably not a new issue, and in fact may be five years old. That being said, I don't ever recall having this problem in the previous versions of Ubuntu that I was using on any of my computers (incl. 9.04 and 8.10). It is a problem in that it happens on a fresh install, and in that the behavior is not what happens in Windows (not that that is a good litmus test) nor what should logically happen. To reproduce, all one has to do is the following:

1) Start a first instance of firefox. Notice you can type in it.
2) Switch to another program.
3) Start a second instance of firefox. Without clicking in it, notice you cannot type in it. (In fact, with desktop effects off, the second window appears behind the other program.)

Now since I am explicitly starting the second instance, I expect the focus to go there immediately. This contrasts with the usage scenario where one might not want it to steal focus when in another application and clicking on a link.

I am still researching the issue, which may, in fact, be a metacity issue (I get the same exact behavior with Google chrome and with SeaMonkey, though I do believe they all share a good deal of code). I plan to leave this particular bug marked as invalid since I screwed up in assigning the statuses to it before. I plan to run a few tests, and I will either find the correct bug this really duplicates, or I will write a new bug report (especially if this turns out to be a regression), and I will post a link in the comments here at that time.

FYI, I am planning to install Jaunty in a VirtualBox and see if that behavior was there (and I was just blind?!) or not.