1108273 - New search engine selection popup flickers and is unusable

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Adam Nielsen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141201171754

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create and open a fresh profile
2. Type "test" into the search bar
3. Attempt to click on the "next" button in the help popup, or select a search engine, or move the cursor outside the Firefox window


Actual results:

The search suggestions and the help popup rapidly disappear then appear again in an endless loop, making it impossible to click on them.  The window focus alternates between Firefox and the hint window.


Expected results:

Nothing - I should have been able to place the cursor over the popups so that I can click on them to make my choice.

Platform: Arch Linux, FF 34.0.5, AwesomeWM 3.5.5

Comment 1

[Adam Nielsen]

Here is an 18 second YouTube video demonstrating the problem: http://youtu.be/dxNqRbMpldU

Comment 2

[Beran Muden]

I can confirm experiencing the same problems on a Ubuntu 12.04 build.
Problems started after the 34.0 update. New profile doesn't work.

Comment 3

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Can you reproduce this with a larger window?

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Dave, I wonder if we should prevent the UITour panels from appearing when the browser window is too small to display them; is this a good idea?

Comment 5

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #4)
> Dave, I wonder if we should prevent the UITour panels from appearing when
> the browser window is too small to display them; is this a good idea?

I don't think the size of the browser window should matter. If the screen size is too small then that would be awkward but I wouldn't expect that to come up much.

Comment 6

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] from comment #5)
> (In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #4)
> > Dave, I wonder if we should prevent the UITour panels from appearing when
> > the browser window is too small to display them; is this a good idea?
> 
> I don't think the size of the browser window should matter. If the screen
> size is too small then that would be awkward but I wouldn't expect that to
> come up much.

It seems to be happening for Linux users with tiling window managers. That's the bug reported here at least.

Comment 7

[Adam Nielsen]

Confirming the window size doesn't matter (I just used a small window to keep the YouTube video small).

I suspect the problem is related to the window flags and the resulting focus change, as the search popup does not appear as a window in the taskbar but the new tips popup does.  The window manager then dutifully changes focus to the tips window, causing the main browser window to lose focus, which causes Firefox to hide the popups.  But when the popups are hidden the only window left to focus is the main browser window, and as soon as that gets focus again the popups reappear and the cycle starts again.

Comment 8

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to Adam Nielsen from comment #7)
> Confirming the window size doesn't matter (I just used a small window to
> keep the YouTube video small).
> 
> I suspect the problem is related to the window flags and the resulting focus
> change, as the search popup does not appear as a window in the taskbar but
> the new tips popup does.  The window manager then dutifully changes focus to
> the tips window, causing the main browser window to lose focus, which causes
> Firefox to hide the popups.  But when the popups are hidden the only window
> left to focus is the main browser window, and as soon as that gets focus
> again the popups reappear and the cycle starts again.

The popup starts flickering as soon as you mouseover the search popup, not the tips popup so I wonder if that is relevant. If you set browser.search.highlightCount in about:config to 0 the tips popup won't show, does that make the problem go away?

Do you have your system set to focus windows on mouse over rather than click?

Comment 9

[Adam Nielsen]

Oh sorry you're right, I was just thinking about the taskbar highlight changing as the focus jumps between windows but you're right, this doesn't happen until mouseover.  I don't have it set to focus a window on mouseover, so perhaps the code focuses the window on mouseover?  Can't think why else it would suddenly focus the tips window when the mouse moves over the search window - no other apps do that on the same system.

Yes, once the tips popup goes away the the problem is resolved - the search box behaves normally when the tips window is not present.

Comment 10

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Should have been fixed by bug 1123620.