I hit is this issue all the time. I'm trying to select the Calc window and raise it to the top. I see the bottom of the Calc window visible below a pile of other windows. So I click on some empty space at the bottom of the Calc window, to the right of the tab bar, and it raises the Calc window to the top (yay!), but it also opens up a new popup ("Insert Sheet") which I then have to Cancel to proceed with my work (boo!). This happens to me several times a session, so it's more annoying than a once-a-session annoyance. Also, if I really wanted to activate this functionality, how am I supposed to know that clicking on empty space to the right of the tab bar will do this? Also, it's only the specific empty space to the right of the tab bar where this happens. The adjoining empty space to the right of the Find box does *not* have this misfeature. This kind of behavior is perhaps more appropriate for a Zork interactive adventure game than a spreadsheet? :-) I think it would be better to just create a dedicated button for this functionality than have the user click on some "random" empty space.
https://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/sc/source/ui/view/tabcont.cxx?r=2502b80e#191 https://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/vcl/source/control/tabctrl.cxx?r=88ac9b0c#1787 https://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/sc/source/ui/view/tabcont.cxx?r=2502b80e#212
It is not random "empty" space--the entire 'Tabs' area is a GUI control is an element of Calc's Sheet UI. While if you click a few pixels higher on the sheet's horizontal scroll it will grab focus bringing the sheet to the foreground--but will also scroll the sheet. Your OS offers controls cycle through and to bring App Frames to the front, while LibreOffice's main menu 'Window' entry controls the LO windows directly--moving program focus to the module frame selected.
@V Stuart Foote: You may close this as you like (I have no control over how you manage your buglist), but this is indeed a grave UX bug. It is unexpected, unexplained, and annoying. It is annoying enough that I created an account just to report it, even though a bug fix would be of no help to me because I wouldn't likely see it for many months out, until it was available in my distribution. You really should take your end-users' complaints about UX problems more seriously, since they're likely showing you how many users actually use your application in real life, in the field. Regardless of how *you* think one should navigate around their desktop, clicking on empty space within a window to raise it to the top is a long-standing (35-year-old) technique that is supported by the vast majority of applications. You're breaking that assumption and contributing to the collection of crappy user interfaces proliferating in our community today.
Again, it is NOT empty space. You are clicking in an active GUI element of the app frame--in this case the Tab bar list of the Sheet UI. Click elsewhere, i.e. depending on os/DE the application frame, or one of the scrollbars. Or use LO's Windows management. Or use the os/DE's App Frame management. Changing LO's behavior, to focus into the application on first click, and then require a second click to launch the 'Insert Sheet' action would be received as a regression/bug for some other group of users. Sorry => NAB