1142556 - Start Dictation and Special Characters Menus do not appear initially on Edit menu

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

On Mac, there are two menuitems added to the Edit menu, Start Dictation and Special Characters.

When you start Thunderbird, they aren't there, but if you take focus away and give it back, they appear.

The same is true with a Compose window.

On Firefox, the menuitems do appear correctly on every window.

Comment 1

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Josh,

I was wondering if you had any idea on this one. I know you worked on the Mac menu code in the past.

This is an edge case, but it is really annoying and I'm struggling to figure out why Firefox is different than Thunderbird (and other Mozilla based apps - BlueGriffon, Postbox) in this case.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Actually, I think smichaud is the right person here.

Steven: Can you offer any advice where to look for this?

Comment 3

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I'm afraid I can only suggest the obvious.  I'm also afraid the "obvious" may be difficult to achieve without some experience reverse engineering Mac system code.

Anyway, my suggestion is to find out what system code makes these two menus appear, then hook it and log stack traces to show what the context is.  Or maybe, if Firefox behaves correctly and Thunderbird doesn't, you can try to find the answer in Mozilla code.

Before I retired, I added code to the Mozilla tree to log stack traces (in nsCocoaDebugUtils.m/h).  But if you're just dealing with (trying to hook) system code, it might be easier to use my interpose library template at https://github.com/steven-michaud/reverse-engineering-on-osx/tree/master/InterposeLibraryTemplate.

Good luck!

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Antony, can you reproduce this?

Comment 5

[Antony]

ah yes, very odd... just looked at the edit, the two options are missing, flick to FF and back to TB and then they are there, meaning in FF i open the Edit menu where the dictation and spec chrs menus are and then back to TB and they are now there

Close and reopen TB, gone again!, flick to FF and back (did NOT open Edit menu this time) and the options are back again!!!!

TB 71.0b1 (64-bit)