pup_dashboard cold launch steals foreground: fresh pup-dashboard profile Chrome fronts its first window before parking

by adom

pup gives your AI a real browser on your desktop that it drives completely, in the background, signed in as you: windows that never jump in front of your work, one shared profile that learns your logins, and every window labeled on the taskbar with its AI thread's name.

Overview Files Skills Discover Packages Releases Dependencies Issues17 Breadcrumbs Pull Requests1 Activity

Closed general

John Lauer · 2mo ago ·closed by John Lauer

Reported live by John 2026-08-16 (window forced in front of him while typing). pup_dashboard for an AI caller is supposed to be background-only, but when the pup-dashboard profile's Chrome is COLD, the process launch shows its first window foreground before pup's park machinery engages. Fix direction: launch the dashboard profile with a start-minimized/offscreen birth like normal session windows (the birth set-diff path already parks at -32000), or pre-warm the profile hidden. Until fixed, AI callers should open the dashboard URL as a normal pup window instead of pup_dashboard.

1 Reply

John Lauer · 2mo ago

Does not reproduce on 2.0.249, measured rather than assumed — and it now has a permanent guard so it cannot come back quietly.

The measurement. I made the dashboard profile genuinely COLD (closed the session, then killed every Chrome process whose command line carries pup-dashboard), put a window I own in the foreground, and sampled GetForegroundWindow() every 500ms across the launch while calling pup_dashboard as an AI caller:

foreground across the cold dashboard launch (24 samples over 12s):
  14:21:00  Example Domain - Google Chrome for Testing
  (no other value — the focused window never changed)

The verb also self-reported reused: false, foregrounded: false, i.e. a genuine cold start that did not raise. A first run with nothing focused likewise showed no change.

Why it is likely fixed rather than lucky. Two things landed after you filed this on 08-16: background launches pass --no-startup-window, so a cold Chrome creates no window of its own and pup makes the window itself over CDP already parked; and 2.0.178 gated raising on _humanClick (a jump-list click), so an AI caller's pup_dashboard has no raise path at all. The park also re-asserts at +2.5s to beat Chrome's late first-run sizing.

The guard is now T10 in tools/selftest.sh and runs on every self-test: focus a window we own, cold the dashboard profile, call pup_dashboard, assert the foreground hwnd is unchanged. Current run: PASS: cold pup_dashboard did NOT steal focus (foreground hwnd 922170 unchanged), selftest 13/13 GREEN.

Reopen if you ever see it jump again — with the guard in place that would be a real regression rather than a mystery, and the check names the before/after hwnd so it points straight at the culprit.

(Your interim advice in the issue — AI callers should open the dashboard URL as a normal pup window — is no longer necessary, but it remains harmless.)

John Lauer closed this · 2mo ago