134586 - selection in location bar is invisible when window is not focused

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect, P5)

Description

[Jamie Zawinski]

(Guessing at component again)

You display selected text differently depending on whether
the window with the selection has focus.  That's all well
and good, but for two problems:

1: if the selected text is in a text field (a form element
   or the URL bar) then the way you display it when the window
   does not have focus is the same as normal text: in other
   words, if I have selected text in Mozilla, then focus on
   another window to paste, it looks like Mozilla has lost the
   selection when I de-focus.  In fact, it still has the focus,
   it's just no longer displaying it highlighted.  That's confusing.

2: when I select text in Mozilla, then go to another app, and
   select text there, the text is still highlighted in Mozilla,
   even though it is no longer the PRIMARY selection.  This is
   both confusing and wrong: when a client loses selection ownership,
   it is expected to de-highlight the formerly-selected text.

Comment 1

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

I am going to avoid any and all witty comments and mark this bug 
CONFIRMED with 2002031105 on mac os x. Bumping to all/all and 
moving to the selection component. 

Comment 2

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Bug (1) seems to be present on all platforms, but the URL bar is not a good 
control to test it with on all platforms, since (on my Mac build, at least) the 
whole field gets re-selected once you re-focus the window. (That should be 
filed as a separate bug -- it shouldn't happen.) See also bug 83278.

Bug (2) is *not* a bug on all platforms, only (apparently) on Unices. The point 
of displaying unfocused selections differently in the first place is so that 
(on non-Unix platforms, apparently) there can be simultaneous selections in 
multiple windows without confusion.

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Bug (2) is a dupe of bug 55437

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

Bug 90587 covers the problem where "the whole [address] field gets re-selected
once you re-focus the window".

Restricting the summary of this bug to "selection in text fields is invisible
when window is not focused".

Comment 5

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

If this bug is about: "selection in text fields is invisible
when window is not focused", then probably bug 58305 depends on this as
currently the situation is that when you have something selected in a textarea,
and you do a Ctr+F Find In This Page, the selection outline in the textarea is
not visible anymore as the 'Find In This Page' window gets the focus.

A kind of a workaround is that you can do a textarea.focus() after the 'Find In
This Page' window has opened. Somehow the textarea looks focussed that way (the
selection in the textarea becomes visible again), but the 'Find In This Page'
window still has the focus.

Comment 6

[Jens Stutte [:jstutte]]

Bulk-downgrade of unassigned, >=5 years untouched DOM/Storage bugs' priority and severity.

If you have reason to believe this is wrong, please write a comment and ni :jstutte.