I have a minor problem, which doesn't bother me much but I'd like to fix it if possible: You know how when you open a program, an icon of the application bounces on the mouse cursor until the process finishes starting up. When a program starts for the first time, this works as expected, and the effect lasts for about a second.

But there's an issue when I click links in other applications, for my web browser (Firefox) to open them, while the browser is already started up: When Firefox is called, its icon bounces on the mouse cursor for about 10 - 15 seconds until it times out. On the task manager, a new entry is created for FireFox, but with the busy icon instead of the FF icon. This entry times out together with the bouncing cursor icon. However, only one Firefox process is opened at a time.

Is it possible to make applications handle communication with Firefox better, so clicking a link doesn't make KDE detect a fake new instance which has to time out?

This is not just with FF, appears with any already running app including Amarok

you can change the feed back option to "no busy cursor" to alleviate this but the task manager will still show busy activity

and you can open a bug report if one already doesn't exist

If you open the Menu Editor (KMenuEdit) and locate the entry for Firefox, then unchecking the "Enable launch feedback" box should solve both the task manager and bouncing cursor icon.

Thanks for all the info. I don't want to disable launcher feedback entirely however... even just for Firefox. Just wanted to fix the timeout when the program is already running and called by another application. If that's not possible, I'll wait for it to be fixed. In the meantime, I could simply set the setting to a lower value like 1 - 5 seconds.

Okay, you will need to wait for a fix then, as i'm not aware of any methods to workaround that issue. Unfortunately i'm not sure how easy it is to fix in the first place, so it might be a while before the issue is fixed.

you might want to see if there's a bug report and if not create one

Hi

To change the timeout independently for both, bouncing cursor and taskbar animation, go to Configure Desktop, Application and System Notifications, Launch Feedback. (Applies to openSUSE 13.1, KDE 4.11.3.)

HTH