[sf-lug] any way to avoid firefox jumping to current workspace when clicking on a link in e.g. thunderbird?

[Rick Moen]

Michael, I have your answer, and also a friendly suggestion about future
queries, to help make it less likely to encounter the frustrating
situation where nobody understands your problem well enough to help you.
It's sadly common for people to fail to get help because they
overdefined and misdefined the problem while describing it.

Quoting Michael Shiloh (michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com):

> i like to keep email and browsing on different workspaces.
                                                 ^^^^^^^^^^

Most of your readers won't know what you mean by 'workspace', because
you didn't say.

> however, whenever i click on an http url in thunderbird, firefox
> bounces over to the current workspace.
> 
> i want firefox to open the url, but to stay in its own workspace.
> 
> anyone know how to do that?

Your wording suggests that you're asking for help with Firefox
configuration.  As it turns out, your problem isn't with configuration
of Firefox at all, but rather with configuration of _Xfce workspaces_.
I figured that out from your passing mention of Xubuntu near the
_bottom_ of your post.  However, people will not be able to see past
the misleading question, and thus you are unlikely to get useful
answers.

Anyway, upon looking up Xfce docs:  http://wiki.xfce.org/faq#window_manager

  Firefox jumps between workspaces, why?

  When a new tab is opened from an external link in Firefox, it asks the
  WM to show the window containing the new tab. If the window that has
  requested to be raised is not on the current desktop, the Xfce Window
  manager will bring it to the current desktop by default. If you do not
  want this behavior, there is a hidden option to control this behavior.
  For Xfce 4.4 in ~/.config/xfce4/xfwm4/xfwm4rc you can put the following:

  activate_action=bring|switch|none

  For Xfce 4.6 you can go to Xfce Menu > Settings > Window Manager Tweaks
  and go to the tab Focus, or you need to use the xfconf-query tool to
  change the setting:

  xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/activate_action -s bring|switch|none

  As the name suggests, the "bring" option moves the window
  requesting to be raised to the current workspace, the "switch"
  option switches workspaces, and the "none" option takes no
  action.

I had no idea about that, until I Web-searched for 'xfce workspace link',
which brought up the correct answer -- as the first hit.