801370 - Non responsive GUI components when Firefox is launched with xfe in fluxbox

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect, P5)

Description

[Harish Badrinath]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:19.0) Gecko/19.0 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20121013030542

Steps to reproduce:

Launch  firefox using xfe, by traversing down the directory tree and hitting enter to launch firefox instead of issuing the command "~/Util.Progs/firefox/firefox & " from  a terminal emulator (in fluxbox).
(Tested in both Firefox 11 and Firefox nightly downloaded ~ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 12:06:10 +0530 )



Actual results:

No consequences to my actions of right clicking on a webpage or trying to view a drop down menu


Expected results:

right clicking on a webpage or trying to view a drop down menu should update the UI

Comment 1

[Harish Badrinath]

A small update, i notice that menu items like Tools, Bookmarks,etc also cant be accessed ( i.e clicking on them or pressing the keyboard shorcuts does not result in any changes to the screen)

Comment 2

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

I wonder whether xfe is providing a bad time in the DESKTOP_STARTUP_ID it sets.

After running "xprop | grep LEADER" to get the client leader window id for firefox,
what does "xprop -id <window id #> | grep STARTUP" output, when run shortly after Firefox has started?

How does the TIME field at the end of that property compare with times output by xev?

Comment 3

[Harish Badrinath]

Attachment: console output from xprop and xev comands

console output from xprop and xev comands as requested by karlt

Comment 4

[Harish Badrinath]

@karlt: Things like Audacious ( a music player ) and evince ( a pdf file reader) seem to function as expected when launched from xfe

Comment 5

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

(In reply to Harish Badrinath from comment #3)
> _NET_STARTUP_ID(UTF8_STRING) = "Xfe/'|home|code|Util.Progs|firefox|firefox'/3811-0-sekon.1_TIME1350266833"

> PropertyNotify event, serial 8, synthetic NO, window 0x2000001,
>    atom 0x27 (WM_NAME), time 128077227, state PropertyNewValue

Thanks.  This is saying that Firefox started either 35 days before or 14 days after xev started.  If that isn't the case then Xfe is providing the wrong time.

(In reply to Harish Badrinath from comment #4)
> @karlt: Things like Audacious ( a music player ) and evince ( a pdf file
> reader) seem to function as expected when launched from xfe

I can't imagine how focus stealing prevention could work properly unless fluxbox has a mechanism for detecting crazy timestamps.  This is what prevents an application taking focus after the user has started typing in another window.
Even with some sort of bad timestamp detection, there is likely going to be a time bomb remaining where for some period of time the timestamps are close enough to expected values that the bug can't be detected.

Other apps may not use gdk_x11_display_get_user_time() and so may not be affected in the same way.  Ideally Gecko should provide the event used to initiate the pointer grabs (for the popup windows) and get the timestamp from that, but passing this through the cross-platform code could be difficult.  Some popups are initiated off nsXULPopupShowingEvent events and so a pointer to the native event would not be suitable; we'd need to copy the timestamp.

gtk_get_current_event_time() is not suitable because of it doesn't do what we need in nested event loops.

I guess we could implement our own gdk_x11_display_get_user_time(), but there would still be bugs remaining because the real bug is in Xfe, or in whatever is giving Xfe that timestamp.

Comment 6

[Harish Badrinath]

@karl: 
Thanks for the helpful explanation. I have filed a bug report for xfe at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3577257&group_id=64835&atid=508822


Regards,
Harish

Comment 7

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1552613

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Harish Badrinath from comment #6)

@karl:
Thanks for the helpful explanation. I have filed a bug report for xfe at
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3577257&group_id=64835&atid=508822

That was fixed 6 years ago