Active windows are losing focus?!

bvandepol
New Contributor III

I have a strange thing going on here:
Every 30sec or so, my active window loses it's focus. I'm not sure how, what or when this started to happen. Also, i cannot find out where the focus is "going to".

I've been keeping an eye on the console to see if any records are created at the moment this happens.

4 REPLIES 4

mojo21221
Contributor II

We have a few users in our environment having the same issue. I haven't got to troubleshoot it a lot, but one thing I plan on trying is upgrading to the mac that have an old version VMware, to VMware Fusion 7. I read somewhere that had a focus stealing bug in it. Could you post a list of Applications the Mac has and the ones that are currently open. Also, what model and OS are installed?

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

This can happen from some background applications running. Since they are faceless apps, they don't really bring focus to anything in particular. While background apps should actually never steal window focus (I believe Apple's guidelines spell that out for developers) sometimes they are poorly designed and will do this.
You can try disabling any and all login items, then log out and log back in, so only applications you generally launch are running and see what happens. If it stops it may be one of your login items doing it.
Keep in mind that many menu bar items are actually applications and not true menu bar items like the ones Apple ships with the OS. Sometimes these are the culprit for this behavior.

hzimmerman
New Contributor III

I was experiencing this on my work machine. It turned out to be an older version of the Google Drive app.

I found this Python code that helped: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5470393?start=29

Mr_Suaz
New Contributor II

I'm having the same issue in my environment. mac OS Sierra High 10.13.6

We don't run Symantec but we do currently have McAfee. I'm currently testing to see if Chrome is maybe the culprit too.