1454479 - Search suggestions in address bar may flash at uncomfortable frequency when pressing/holding a key on the keyboard

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180323154952

Steps to reproduce:

1) Open a new tab

2) Hold a key down on the keyboard (for example, press and hold "q")


Actual results:

Search suggestions flash somewhat like a strobe light.

(Results show for "q", disappear, show for "qq", disappear again, show for "qqq"; This happens many times a second.)


Expected results:

Some rate control for search suggestions should exist, so as to prevent uncomfortable flashing when a key is held in the address bar.

(I am no expert on epilepsy, but I get the sense this could be an issue for people who experience light-sensitive epileptic episodes as well; I wanted to file this bug mainly for the epilepsy concern. Strobe effect is more pronounced against the dark purple background of Private Browsing mode.)

Comment 1

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

Hello Suburp,

I have tried reproducing your issue on Windows10 with FF 59 release version and 61.0a1 Nightly version (2018-04-18) , but I was unsuccessful. 

Please test if the issue is reproducible in safe mode, here is a link that can help you:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

Also, please download Firefox Nightly from here: https://nightly.mozilla.org/ and retest the problem.

If none of the above solves your problem, please try with a new profile; you have the steps here:https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Managing-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager

Thank you for your contribution!

Comment 2

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

Hi,

I can reproduce in Release 59 and Nightly 61, both in safe mode.

The amount of flashing varies by how strong your CPU/GPU/[Hard drive?] are, and how busy they are.

On one laptop, I only see a bit of flashing, maybe one flash every two seconds. On another laptop, I get several flashes a second. And it varies a little as the CPU/GPU/[Hard drive?] become more or less busy with background tasks.

Comment 3

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

Hello,

If it's possible, can you please record the reproduction of the issue? Here is a tool you could use to record your screen: https://www.screenpresso.com/download/

Thank you for your contribution!

Comment 4

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

Attachment: Flashing_Search_Suggestions.webm

Sure. Here you go (see attached file.)

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I still cannot reproduce this bug, but could be because my system is quite fast.
May be similar to bug 1360506. In most cases we could set minResultsforPopup to 0, so we don't close the popup if we think there are no results. Though there may be a few edge cases where the results panel could appear broken.

Comment 6

[Dan D (volunteer tester from the community)]

By the way, this is easier to reproduce if you keyboard mash several keys, like this: "sdfkjhsalkjhasdoflih"

This made the search suggestions flash, both on a very low end laptop, and a decent, powerful-ish desktop.

(Atom N450 for the laptop, Core 2 Duo E8400 for the desktop.)

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Yes, I see a few flashes when typing several keys.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This is no more a problem