IE7 has an annoying habit of stealing focus on every website.

It’s annoying and annoying.

How do I turn it off? (And don’t say by downloading firefox. That takes too long to load)

What I mean is, I’ll have two windows open. I’ll click a link on one then open the second window to read while I wait for the first one to load the new page.
But the first one steals focus once the page is loaded (it puts itself on top of what I’m reading to avoid windows gui jargon).

To repeat - annoying.

Are you attempting to view the internet on a Game Boy?

hmm… I just checked, and mine doesn’t do that Lobsang. I have IE7, and I’ve never changed any setting related to this. I’ll poke around in my settings and if I find anything I’ll post it. But this strikes me as an odd thing to have happen.

An amd 1.4ghz turion (single core) with 2gb of ram and a millisecond-impatient brain.

In the spirit of eating hats I am going to ask - does firefox load as instantly as ie7 does?

It’s a known bug, and has been since the Beta.

That pisses me off too.

I have both Firefox and Opera but there are still websites that I must use for work that are best with IE, except that as the page is loading it keeps stealing focus.

Load the pages in tabs rather than separate windows.

For the issue of loading IE while using other programs, I haven’t tried this with IE7 yet, but with earlier versions, if I minimized the window rather than simply clicking or alt-tabbing over to the other program, it didn’t steal focus. See if that works?

Geobabe is right - I do tabbed browsing all the time and when they load, it doesn’t maximize that tab. I just see the tab name change and I know the page is loaded.

When saying Firefox has slow loading times, are you talking about loading pages, or the initial firing up of the browser itself? To my knowledge IE7 and FF are roughly equivalent in the speed at which they render pages. Actual program loading I don’t much care about since I tend to use a single browser session for long periods of time (days, actually). In this regard IE7 does beat FF, but only because Windows preloads IE7 and essentially has it running all the time. I’m quite sure someone has made a preloader for Firefox that would do the same thing if you care about those 5 seconds.

Waitaminute. I never use IE. So windows is running a program that I’m not using and wasting CPU? Can I turn this off?

According to Microsoft, no. In fact this has been central to their defense in multiple lawsuits (Netscape vs. Microsoft being the biggest of them).

I don’t like tabbed browsing. I prefer the ‘tabs’ on the start bar as my non-internet programs go there too. I am a heavy multitasker when I’m using my computer.

That’s the reason I use an extension on my Firefox to put the tab bar at the bottom of the browser. Most people tend to use the default setting of having them at the top, presumably because that’s like tabs in other applications, but I find it’s a lot easier a transition to tabbed browsing if you keep them at the bottom.

Didn’t they finally get rid of “browser” integration with Vista?

So am I, but I prefer to do as much as possible with keystrokes instead of a mouse; you can switch between applications using alt-tab, and then in Firefox (and I think IE) you can switch between tabs within the browser using ctrl-PgUp or ctrl-PgDn. I tend to have five or ten Firefox tabs open at a time, and putting them all on the taskbar would crowd the thing into unreadability.

IE7 still steals focus when using tabs anyway.

IE is part of the operating system.

In fact IE, Windows Explorer, and the Task Manager are all actually the same program. You can type a web address into the address box in the Windows File Explorer and it will display the website.