Binary package hint: firefox
When instructed by liferea to load a webpage, firefox siezes focus. This results in the user being yanked over to the desktop in which firefox is located. This behavior is detrimental to multi-desktop use of firefox+liferea, e.g. on the eee, which does not have sufficient screen size to house both apps simultaneously.
1. This is hardy, up to date as of last night.
2. These are the firefox and liferea packages to reproduce, but the bug is likely in firefox, if not also in metacity/compiz (for causing the user to suddenly switch workspaces)
3. relevant dpkg -l output:
ii firefox 3.0~b3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4 meta package for the popular mozilla web browser
ii liferea 1.4.12-0ubuntu2 feed aggregator for GNOME
4) I expected the pages to load in firefox silently, and I'd turn to them when I was ready. I tend to set up a large set of URLs at once in lifere, then read them all later.
5) FF yanked me over to its workspace from liferea's.
Btw, the same behaviour can be seen when clicking any links (e.g. in pidgin or in the changes list of update-manager). So indeed firefox is the program to look at.
If it's a bug or a feature - you can't really say, can you? (Although I must say I agree with you that I think IMHO it is better, if tabs get loaded in the background, but someone else might think something different...)
Any further opinions?