Perhaps there is something we could can do in terms of detecting if the current viewport that focus is being set into is in a window that has focus, if not, ignore setting the focus. ?

When focus is applied on an element in the child window IE brings the window in front. This behavior seems to be IE specific.

To avoid this issue the bridge belonging to the blurred window will avoid applying focus on the elements, but it will save the ID of the element needing to receive focus. When the child window receives back the focus it will apply the focus on the element corresponding to the saved ID.

Another hurdle posed by IE was window.onblur behavior which is not in line with the behavior the reset of the browsers have. IE incorrectly fire 'onblur' events when focus moves from the window to some element inside the same window. Normally the event should be fired only when focus moves from one window to another.
To fix this issue the IE specific event listener document.onfocusout is used. The document.onfocusout allows to differentiate between a window blur due to a focus moved on an internal element versus focus moved on a different window.

See how IE behavior differs and the workaround: http://pro-thoughts.blogspot.com/2006/10/incorrect-behavior-of-windowonblur.html .

Need to revert this change as it causes a serious regression in ICE-6262.

Need to add this feature to ICEfaces 2.0 also.

Introduced com.icesoft.faces.windowFocusRestore configuration parameter for the enabling/disabling of focus restoring when using multiple windows. 1.8 only.
com.icefaces.face.windowFocusRestore is set to 'false' which effectively disables window focus restoring by default.

Changed the focus code in 2.0/compat to reference current focus strategy indirectly so that ice.applyFocus alias (for local var applyFocus) is automatically following the reference to the chosen focus strategy.

Made 1.8 focus code to run in IE only.