Comment 24 for bug 224475

Havoc Pennington:

Not exactly correct.

IMO this is a UI bug (not Adobe specific).

Changing the volume using keyboard shortcuts in Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) takes the focus out of the active gnome widget temporarily.

This can cause annoying flicker if the currently focused widget displays some form of focus rectangle or other visual indication that the widget has the focus.

This is the reason for example for the behavior described by bladedot in comment #17. In Firefox, when the keyboard focus is on a hyperlink, the status bar displays the target address of the link. When the focus leaves a hyperlink, Firefox reverts the status bar text to some other value (in this case "Done"). This is why, when changing the volume the status bar in Firefox changes temporarily. This same effect of visual flicker can be observed in any GNOME application under different circumstances.

I have no idea what the reason for stealing keyboard focus when reacting to shortcut keys and/or displaying notifications is - but from the user's perspective there is no good reason to do this, and many reasons not to do this - the best one being the Adobe Flash player fullscreen behavior, which apparently exits fullscreen mode on losing keyboard focus.

I have no idea whether this is GNOME-specific of Ubuntu-specific, but I know it needs to be fixed, and it would be much easier to get this fixed in an open source project - GNOME or Ubuntu, than trying to get Adobe the change their closed-source Flash player, for a very tiny part of their audience.

Thanks.