1404459 - Disable vibrancy effect on macOS for titlebars due to High Sierra glitches

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

I might have some of this story wrong, so hopefully mstange, jrmuizel or spohl can jump in in case I got something wrong.

Recently, we've switched to a new SDK to build Firefox on macOS. This allows us to sidestep some crashing issues with the older SDKs. This also allows us to build for the newest release of macOS, High Sierra.

For Firefox 57, we've turned on the "vibrancy" effect in the titlebar and sidebar for macOS. This effect is a translucency effect that was landed in bug 1377284, and was part of the Photon spec.

With the new SDK, our implementation of the vibrancy effect glitches out pretty hard on macOS High Sierra. It's not even close to shippable - the titlebar looks mostly broken. Perhaps we can post a screenshot in a sec (I don't have High Sierra, or else I'd do it).

The glitch only appears to affect the titlebar, and not the sidebar.

Users on Nightly and Beta with High Sierra will already be exposed to this glitch.

We've got ~5 weeks until 57 ships to release. We should probably disable vibrancy on macOS until we know what we want to do here.

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Requesting tracking for 57 because of a pretty stark visual glitch in titlebars with the default theme on macOS High Sierra (the version of macOS that just came out).

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

I'll also note that having spoken with Graphics, it sounds like there's a theoretical solution to this issue, but that the solution is sufficiently high risk as to be inappropriate for landing for 57.

Comment 3

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

There might be a different solution that is appropriate for 57, but in order to reduce risk, we should definitely have a plan ready for the case where we can't go ahead with vibrancy.

Comment 4

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2017-09-29 at 12.35.18.png

Is this the visual problem this bug is talking about?

Oddly, the screenshot doesn't accurately show what is on my screen. The white stripe at the top of the browser is black normally, and only white in the screenshot. It looks almost as bad in black though, and the cut-off window buttons in the top left are still cut off with the black version.

Comment 5

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

(In reply to Mike Cooper [:mythmon] from comment #4)
> Created attachment 8913827 [details]
> Screen Shot 2017-09-29 at 12.35.18.png
> 
> Is this the visual problem this bug is talking about?

Yes

Comment 6

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hey mstange, did I see that this is getting resolved in bug 1400057? If so, can we close this one out as WONTFIX?

Comment 7

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Yes, I think vibrancy is good to go for 10.13 now.