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Safari Annoyance: Opening Minimized Windows

I often maintain a few Safari windows. One will have "general browsing" stuff - things I'll open for reading later. I call this my "miscellaneous" window. I'll also have a few project-specific windows open, each with a few tabs. I keep these minimized, as I only work in them from time to time.

I've found a bug that's somewhat reproducible, and it has to do with that working state: "miscellaneous" window up, all "project" windows minimized.

When Safari isn't hidden, clicking a link in, say, my email app or text editor will properly open the URL in a new tab in Safari's topmost window. That's usually my "miscellaneous" window, so all is well.

When Safari is hidden, however, hell oftentimes breaks loose. More often than not, Safari will unhide itself, un-minimize one of my minimized "project" windows behind the already un-minimized "misc" window, and open the URL in a new tab in the "project" window instead of the top-most (and already un-minimized) "misc" window.

It's always the same project window, too - the "oldest" window (or the one with the lowest document ID, if you want to look at it the way you might in AppleScript). If I create a new window, drag all the tabs from my "project" window to it, and close the old project window, I can eventually create a situation wherein the "misc" window is "oldest," but I shouldn't have to: Safari should respect the un-minimized window(s) I have on-screen without pulling the wrong window from the Dock.

P.S. The title, had I felt like being verbose, would have read "Safari Annoyance: Opening Minimized Windows when Hidden and a Perfectly Good Window Already Exists For Crying Out Loud"

3 Responses to "Safari Annoyance: Opening Minimized Windows"

  1. Erik, have you filed a bug against Safari describing this issue?

  2. [quote comment="39398"]Erik, have you filed a bug against Safari describing this issue?[/quote]

    Unlike most bugs I report here, I haven't, but only because I can't reproduce it 100% of the time. I spent some time today trying to narrow it down. I caught it in a movie once (anyone want a 933MB movie? heh heh), but that was about it. I'm really not sure why it sometimes opens another window from the dock and other times uses the window that's present (among the same set of windows).

  3. This is still annoying to this day. As far as I can tell, I believe the default behavior of Safari is to open a link in the oldest open window. Minimized windows tend to get old, hence the annoyance of Safari bringing up minimized windows when opening a link from another app.

    You can easily test this. Wait for it to happen. Then re-minimize the window. The behavior should be repeatable infinitely. Next copy the URL of the window you want minimized and close that window. Open a new window, paste the URL, hit return, and minimize it. Then open the external link and it will no longer go to that window.

    Of course this doesn't help - it just explains the behavior. The only thing that might eventually help is filing a bug report:

    http://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html