372778 - submenus of Bookmarks menu close upon expansion when navigating by the keyboard

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 387990

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Joanmarie Diggs]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070305 Minefield/3.0a3pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070305 Minefield/3.0a3pre

Under certain circumstances, using the keyboard to expand a submenu within the Bookmarks menu will cause that submenu to close immediately.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
0. Prep:  Set your home page to be blank, import the (to be) attached bookmarks file.  Reboot.
1. Launch Firefox 3 via the keyboard
2. Press Alt B for the Bookmarks menu
3. Down Arrow to the Ubuntu and Free Software Links submenu
4. Right Arrow to expand this submenu
5. Down Arrow to to the Mozilla Firefox submenu
6. Right Arrow to expand this submenu
Actual Results:  
Upon pressing Right Arrow in step 6, the Mozilla Firefox submenu expands, but is immediately closed/collapsed.  Sometimes, this expansion/collapse occurs in step 4 though this is less likely.

Expected Results:  
The submenu that was just opened/expanded would remain open/expanded.

As silly as it sounds, this is an elusive bug.  Hence the suggestion to reboot: In my experience, if the bug doesn't happen the first time, it probably won't until you reboot and give it another go.

Other things which, in my experience, seem to cause the bug to NOT be reproducible:

1. Using the mouse to launch Firefox
2. Interacting with the dialog box which asks if you want to start a new session or restore the previous session.
3. Using certain pages as your home/start page (e.g. Netvibes)

Comment 1

[Joanmarie Diggs]

Attachment: aforementioned bookmarks file

Comment 2

[Joanmarie Diggs]

One more piece of information I failed to mention (sorry!):

This problem was initially reported as a bug against the Orca screen reader.  In the process of investigating that report, we discovered that when the problem occurs "Mozilla Firefox" claims to be a menu item.  When things work as expected, "Mozilla Firefox" claims to be a menu.  (We were then able to reproduce the problem without Orca or assistive technologies enabled, hence filing it here.) See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402835 beginning with comment #10. 

Hope this helps!  And thanks!!

Comment 3

[Joanmarie Diggs]

Adding the keyword "access" and the Sun Beijing folks because the nature of this bug makes it more likely to be experienced by users who are blind (because they're using the keyboard rather than the mouse) and hence has a11y implications.

Comment 4

[Tim Miao]

I can not reproduce this bug with firefox trunk nightly build on solaris.

Comment 5

[Ginn Chen]

Comment on attachment 257468 [details]
aforementioned bookmarks file

change mime to text/plain, hope it can make download this attachment easier

Comment 6

[Ginn Chen]

I could not reproduce this issue with nightly Firefox trunk and Orca 1.0.0 bundled with OpenSolaris.

Joanmarie, can you specify your Orca version and Gnome version?
Thanks.

Mark as WFM for now.

Comment 7

[Joanmarie Diggs]

GNOME 2.18 (Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with latest updates) and Orca from svn head.  HOWEVER, I can reproduce this problem even without Orca running and even without assistive technologies enabled.

Comment 8

[Willie Walker]

Ginn:  this is an intermittent problem and may also be related to the hardware configuration of your machine.  One of our users comments on this bug regularly, and he continually works with the latest nightly builds of Firefox. Please reopen this bug.

Comment 9

[steppenwolf2]

I can almost in every case reproduce this submenu bug. Only in a few cases, 
which I cannot reproduce it has gone.
Additionally I observe that I cannot scroll my bookmarks menu correctly:
1. When scrolling the menu by using cursorup/down the focus locks up on an 
item, e.g. you have to press teh cursor keys twice to come to the next 
item.
2. When trying to focus an item by pressing its first letter, the focus 
seems to be there, but in fact it isn't. When I try to open the specified 
URL, it either doesn't open or the wrong URL opens up.
Note: I imported the bookmarks.html from my Windows machine and it is 
rather large.
My Configuration: A 1Ghz machine, 256 MB RAM of which I have to share 16 MB 
with my on-board graphic card. Ubuntu Edgy, the latest SVN Orca screen 
reader with speech and braille but no magnifier. The very latest nightly 
Firefox.
Notes: I have also tested the latest Firefox for Windows and never 
experienced this bug. It doesn't appear in Firefox 2.0.0.2, which is 
installed on my Linux machine too.
Hermann

Comment 10

[Rich Burridge]

Yes, this bug still exists for me too. This is with the very latest
Firefox 3.0a3 build on very latest Ubuntu Feisty.

I can't get it to fail without Orca running. Firefox on its own will
nicely display sub-menu and let me arror right into them.

When I start latest Orca though, I can no longer even walk right into
the "Ubuntu and Free Software Links" submenu (before it was only a
problem two submenus down.

For me, this isn't an intermittent problem. It happens every time.
If there is anything you'd like me to try to give you further information
please let me know.

Comment 11

[Evan Yan]

I reproduced this bug twice between twenty or so tryings. Both of the twice successful reproducing are under Ubuntu 7.04 herd 4 with accessibility enabled.

=>confirmed.

Comment 12

[Joanmarie Diggs]

I just reproduced this in Thunderbird (version 3 alpha 1 (20070328)):  I had gone into the View menu with Alt V, Down Arrowed to the Layout menu, and then used Right Arrow to expand it.  The Layout menu kept collapsing/closing.  Orca was not running, but assistive technologies were enabled.

Comment 13

[steppenwolf2]

Today I downloaded the last nightly build, and I observed that the problem 
is becoming worse:
When opening the bookmakrs menu and trying to open a submenu, I get bounced 
back on the page I opened last. In earlier versions I could open the 
submenu 
of the bookmarks and I was placed on the first item. Now even this doesn't 
happen anymore.
Firefox 3.0a5pre, Ubuntu Feisty the screen reader Orca from the last SVN.
Note: As I wrote before, I never experienced this in nightly Windows 
versions of Firefox. I seems to be a Linux only problem.

Comment 14

[Aaron Leventhal]

I wonder if it has to do with our "menugenerated" code that tries to create accessible object for all submenus when a11y is active, so GOK can have access to them.

I also wonder if the fix for bug 279703 will have any effect.

Comment 15

[Willie Walker]

Ginn, Evan: is there a chance either one of you can take a look at this?  A few of our users run into this reliably and they really want to be able to use bookmarks.

Comment 16

[Aaron Leventhal]

See comment 14 -- there is a significant rewrite of the core code which will most likely affect this.

Comment 17

[Evan Yan]

let's wait for bug 279703 fixed.

Comment 18

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Hopefully this gets resolved when bug 279703 is fixed, blocking for now.

Comment 19

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

removing qawanted,  it looks like this might get fixed in another bug as well as it is plussed for 3.0 so will be on the radar

Comment 20

[[:Aleksej]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20070622 Minefield/3.0a6pre, Debian 4.0 (almost exactly; latest updates), metacity/GNOME.
If I use keys to open a menu so that it appears under the pointer, then:
- any submenu whose title is not under the pointer would close immediately if opened from keyboard,
- when closing from keyboard any submenu that is under the pointer, the menu selection is lost (the original menu stays open, but no items are selected).

Comment 21

[Joanmarie Diggs]

I wish I had noticed Aleksej's comment sooner. :-)

I just spent quite some time trying to figure out a similar issue and it boiled down to exactly the above.   Having not seen that comment, I just opened bug 387990 on it.  THEN it occurred to me that these two might be related. Live and learn. :-)

Comment 22

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Can people try to reproduce again now that the popup rewrite has landed?

Comment 23

[[:Aleksej]]

The first item of comment #20 is reproduced. Not sure what I meant in the second part, because I cannot reproduce it on either of the two builds.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a7pre) Gecko/2007072004 Minefield/3.0a7pre

Comment 24

[Ginn Chen]

Because of bug 388608, if it could not be reproduced with current trunk, doesn't mean this bug is really gone.

I guess bug 387664 is similar to this one.

Comment 25

[Joanmarie Diggs]

Given that I couldn't reliably reproduce this before and that Rich Burridge could, I followed up with him.  Here's what he said:

-----------
I've just updated my gutsy box with:

1/ All the latest update (308 Mb of them).
2/ Latest Firefox 3.0 tarball (25th July 2007).
3/ Latest Orca from SVN HEAD.

Very interesting results. If I have the mouse pointer anywhere but in the menu
I'm trying to navigate, then I DO NOT see the problem of being "bounced back"
when you try to enter a sub-menu (tested with the "Ubuntu and Free Software Links" under the bookmarks menu). 
-----------

So either this bug is fixed OR it is the problem described in 387990 but we just didn't realize the mouse pointer was the culprit at the time. :-)  I'm thinking this one can be closed out as a duplicate of bug 387990.