1148552 - Investigate left edge transparency issue in browser toolbar menu

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1269774

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Settings and Preferences, defect)

Description

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

Attachment: screenshot.png

Left edge of menu is noticeably transparent (you can see the characters from the page coming through) on my Nexus 5.

I've sometimes seem this not be an issue on Nexus 4, not sure what's happening. Will need help reproducing.

Comment 1

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

NI-ing kbrosnan here... this seems to only trigger for me sometimes, but I can't see to figure out why.

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

I see this on all releases and all the time when I look for it. Seems to be a partially transparent pixel. Is there control over the alpha values for the menu? Looked at a N10 and do not see this. Checked a Galaxy S5 and see this issue.

Comment 3

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

mcomella mentioned this might be non-trivial to fix. I think the code might be really messy here but I think it's worth cleaning up. 

Going to extend the circle a bit here and include Barbara and Margaret for some thoughts.

Comment 4

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Anthony Lam (:antlam) from comment #3)
> mcomella mentioned this might be non-trivial to fix.

More specifically, I remember briefly trying to figure out what was going on here and was unable to. If I had to guess, it probably has to do with how we create the shadow, or something going wrong in our crazy menu code.

A possible workaround could be to replace the menu container with CardView and use its shadow instead.

Comment 5

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

> A possible workaround could be to replace the menu container with CardView
> and use its shadow instead.

Any idea on effort for this? depending on that I'd like to decide.

Comment 6

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:bbermes] from comment #5)
> > A possible workaround could be to replace the menu container with CardView
> > and use its shadow instead.
> 
> Any idea on effort for this? depending on that I'd like to decide.

T-shirt size, I'd say M. It should really be a S, but I expect something funky to come up. It'd also be good to check how pulling in the CardView dependency affects our APK size, which will add to the time this takes.

Comment 7

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

Thanks, seems a bit of "too much effort right now", and if that's ok with both of you, mute this for a little while until it bubbles up again. Sounds good?

Comment 8

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:bbermes] from comment #7)
> Thanks, seems a bit of "too much effort right now", and if that's ok with
> both of you, mute this for a little while until it bubbles up again. Sounds
> good?

wfm. We'll likely pull in the CardView dep on another bug first so at least that overhead might get taken care of.

Comment 9

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:bbermes] from comment #7)
> Thanks, seems a bit of "too much effort right now", and if that's ok with
> both of you, mute this for a little while until it bubbles up again. Sounds
> good?

WFM. Though, let's keep track of this so it doesn't go forgotten. I think the menu is pretty high visibility and I hate to leave it looking broken. :)

Comment 10

[Andrzej Hunt :ahunt]

This will be fixed in Bug 1269774, therefore marking as duplicate. (I'm already fiddling with the 9patches there, so I might as well include this fix there.)

This is a 9-patch issue, including the border pixels in the stretchable area leads to artifacts.

The Android 9-path docs explicitly advise against this:

> Also, provide one pixel of extra safe space in the graphics before and
> after stretchable regions to avoid interpolation during scaling that may
> cause the color at the boundaries to change. "

( http://developer.android.com/tools/help/draw9patch.html )

Using the "Show bad patches" option in the 9-patch editor in Android Studio also highlights that the border pixels are "bad" and shouldn't be included in the stretchable area (i.e. the top/left markers need to be reduced by 1px at each end).