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About a month ago Windows Explorer started the annoying habit of routinely moving its most recently opened window into the foreground. Is there a way to stop it from doing this?
For example, I'll open an Explorer window to open a file into another application, and a few minutes later, for no apparent reason, Windows Explorer will interrupt the application by popping its Explorer window into the foreground. The same thing will happen when watching a video: a minute or two into watching the video and the most recently opened Explorer window will move into the foreground interrupting the video.
The only way to stop this behavior is to close all Explorer windows while watching a video or working in another application. Annoying as heck. Any suggestions? Thanks.
Microsoft Windows 11 Home Version 10.0.22621 Build 22621
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Which forum, so I know to avoid it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/o22lfc/microsoft_official_support_thread/
So Microsoft's "Official" Support Thread is hosted at Reddit, and not a domain hosted by microsoft.com... got it! (not you... them...)
Any Reddit whose pinned post begins as follows, "Microsoft Listens (sic) This (sic) thread was created in order to facilitate easy-to-access support for our Reddit subscribers" is probably not worth anyone's time.
I recently discussed this with some folks on another forum dedicated Microsoft tech support. I don't know what their relationship is with Microsoft, but they were aggressively defensive of Microsoft to the point of incivility, insisting that despite so many users reporting this issue here on the Microsoft Community Forum, this problem was yet just a "bug" affecting a tiny percentage of Windows 11 users; they themselves claimed to be unaware of it. As one respondent put it, they hadn't experienced the issue, nor had any of their "friends."
When I suggested that this was more than a bug, that so far as I was concerned, Windows 11 was broken, they went full ad hominem using words like "ranting" and "idiot" to characterize me. Again, I do not know whether any of these people have any professional connection to Microsoft, but they sure as heck didn't want want to hear criticism of Microsoft or Windows 11.
Did they poll ALL of their "friends?" (Or perhaps they don't have too many friends...).
It's not like the 522 users who "all have the same question" are hallucinating. Good grief.
As an IT person - I openly admit "Broken" IS a trigger word. I hate thinking that something I've built doesn't work correctly. It triggers me to Do My Job and fix the problem. And then, I Thank the person who pointed it out. Coding is a big messy world, things will break - people who report the errors are Helping you out! There's ZERO excuse for this bug being left uncorrected for so long. There are millions of people whose workflows involve having a window open in the background. It's not even a topic worth debating. Someone at MS is being lazy and/or living in denial about their own work/skills/abilities. Just get over it and fix it. Do your job.
Thank you for your response. I think what surprised me at r/microsoft was how quickly respondents attacked me personally right out of the gate. Again, I don't know how many of these personal attacks came from Microsoft professionals, but they did help to confirm my concern that something is amiss.
I've been using Windows since version 3.1 was released in 1992, and while I've seen a lot of issues, never have I encountered one so productivity-impeding as this.
As an IT person - I openly admit "Broken" IS a trigger word. I hate thinking that something I've built doesn't work correctly. It triggers me to Do My Job and fix the problem. And then, I Thank the person who pointed it out. Coding is a big messy world, things will break - people who report the errors are Helping you out! There's ZERO excuse for this bug being left uncorrected for so long. There are millions of people whose workflows involve having a window open in the background. It's not even a topic worth debating. Someone at MS is being lazy and/or living in denial about their own work/skills/abilities. Just get over it and fix it. Do your job.
Thank you.
I would also reject the suggestion that a viable workaround is to ensure File Explorer is closed... if you were to navigate to a folder using File Explorer and open a Word document in that folder by double-clicking it, File Explorer would remain open and the Word document would now be in the foreground.
It would be a pain to then manually close File Explorer to avoid this bug.
To be fair, Windows 11 isn't completely broken. Windows Explorer does successfully allow you to navigate folders, choose files, etc. And you can run successfully run applications for work and play. It's just... when you try to do both at the same time... you trigger this unnecessary, silly, and incredibly irritating bug; which is very disappointing in a product named Windows that, somehow, doesn't seem able to handle windows as well as it used to!
Thanks for continuing to push for proper recognition and fix!
Yes, Windows is not completely broken, and "broken" appears to be the word that set off the acrimony on r/microsoft; maybe that's a trigger word for tech support people and/or coders?
