1491261 - mail moving usability broken/poor drag visibility when gpu acceleration is disabled

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1464540

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[kolAflash]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Build ID: 20180830143136

Steps to reproduce:

(it's unknown if this bug affects any other os than Linux)

1. Disable gpu acceleration (depends on your desktop environment).

KDE
temporary hotkey: ALT - SHIFT - F12
temporary shell: KWIN_COMPOSE=N kwin_x11 --replace
permanent: systemsettings5 -> Display and Monitor -> Compositor -> Enable compositor on startup

2. Select some mails (at least three) and move them to another folder via drag and drop.


Actual results:

When moving the mails, they'll stick to your cursor and you won't see the folders "behind" them. So you can't see to exactly which folder you move them.


Expected results:

I'm not sure what was the behavior in Thunderbird < 60.
But when gpu acceleration is enabled, the mails sticked to the mouse cursor become half transparent, so you can see the folders "behind" them.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Walt, can you test

Comment 2

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

I could not enable gpu acceleration as it is not supported by my platforms. Ubuntu 18.04.1 and Linux Mint 19.

GPU #1
      Active: Yes
      Description: NVIDIA Corporation -- GeForce GT 630/PCIe/SSE2
      Vendor ID: NVIDIA Corporation
      Device ID: GeForce GT 630/PCIe/SSE2
      Driver Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 390.48

HW_COMPOSITING: blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform
OPENGL_COMPOSITING: unavailable by default: Hardware compositing is disabled

Testing with TB 60, the emails are transparent for me when I use drag and drop to move them. 

TB 52.9.1 has a small page with a hand icon when I drag and drop several messages from one folder to another. Much cleaner appearance than the three mails in TB 60 with the transparent background. 

Did we lose an icon or is that a new behavior?

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

> Did we lose an icon or is that a new behavior?
I vaguely recall something similar

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Yes, there was already a bug about this. I can't find it now unfortunately. It's a new toolkit behavior.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I can't find it either :(

Comment 6

[kolAflash]

(In reply to WaltS48 [:walts48] from comment #2)
> I could not enable gpu acceleration as it is not supported by my platforms.
> Ubuntu 18.04.1 and Linux Mint 19.
I'm not talking about the GPU acceleration setting in Thunderbird, but about the setting of your desktops window manager. (e.g. kwin)


> Testing with TB 60, the emails are transparent for me when I use drag and
> drop to move them.

This is the behavior which I only get, if acceleration is enabled in my desktops windows manager.


> TB 52.9.1 has a small page with a hand icon when I drag and drop several
> messages from one folder to another. Much cleaner appearance than the three
> mails in TB 60 with the transparent background. 

May be the best alternative.


Please let me know if I can help with any further information!

Comment 7

[Mike Coppins]

TB 60.2.1 x64 on Lubuntu 18.04 LTS 64-bit.  GPU hardware acceleration enabled (amdgpu driver).

Here's how moving a mail looks here since the TB update:

http://lorien.legolas.com/tb%20screenshot.png

Comment 8

[Mike Coppins]

The pointer in that screenshot was incorrect (a quirk of the screenshot'ing tool I used I guess).

Comment 9

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

You can set in Preferences/Advanced/Config Editor... the pref nglayout.enable_drag_images to false. Then the old behaviour should be enabled again.

Comment 10

[Mike Coppins]

Richard:  Thanks, that works for me.

Comment 12

[Paul Oldham]

For the record I apparently have GPU acceleration enabled according to glxinfo at least:

$ glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"
direct rendering: Yes

but I am seeing this behaviour.

The "fix" using the Config Editor does make the problem go away so I'm happy however there's still a bug to be resolved at some point if someone is going that way.

Comment 13

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Using that command, it appears I also have GPU acceleration enabled, but my Thunderbird's do not have "Use hardware acceleration when available" enabled.

So where do we turn it off so we can see if that is causing the problem?

Comment 14

[Paul Oldham]

For me it happens whether I have "Use hardware acceleration when available" checked or unchecked.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

confirming based on multipl reports. 

Can someone test a beta https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/channel/ or nightly build to verify it fails in newer code?

Comment 17

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Magnus, what do you think, should we set nglayout.enable_drag_images to false for Linux?

Comment 18

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #16)
> confirming based on multipl reports. 
> 
> Can someone test a beta https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/channel/
> or nightly build to verify it fails in newer code?

Tested 64.0b1 and latest nightly (Build ID 20181027100423) on Linux and it fails in both.

Comment 19

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I wonder how common this problem is. I would prefer to keep the pref enabled. I tried it set to false and it's not super-bad, but also not as nice as when set to true (and working).

Comment 21

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #19)
> I wonder how common this problem is. I would prefer to keep the pref
> enabled. I tried it set to false and it's not super-bad, but also not as
> nice as when set to true (and working).

It is the same way in Firefox 63 Bookmarks Manager.

I don't drag and drop often, but in testing I've noticed that the folder highlights if you move the dragged items over it, allowing the items to be dropped into the folder. Whether it be Firefox bookmarks or Thunderbird email.

I could get used to the new behavior if I didn't use 'Move To" from the context menu.

Comment 22

[Gabriele Tozzi]

Same problem here. The problem started with latest Thunderbird update. It worked fine before.

Comment 23

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to Richard Marti (:Paenglab) from comment #9)

You can set in Preferences/Advanced/Config Editor... the pref
nglayout.enable_drag_images to false. Then the old behaviour should be
enabled again.

Richard: Thanks a lot.

Comment 24

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to Richard Marti (:Paenglab) from comment #17)

Magnus, what do you think, should we set nglayout.enable_drag_images to
false for Linux?

Good idea. The problem is not only related to some window manager used locally. I got this problem with a nx-based terminal server. Setting nglayout.enable_drag_images to false solved the problem.

Comment 25

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #19)

I wonder how common this problem is. I would prefer to keep the pref (nglayout.enable_drag_images) enabled.
I tried it set to false and it's not super-bad, but also not as nice as when set to true (and working).

I'm CCing folks with various flavors of linux for feedback:

1. which linux and desktop you are using?
2. Is the behavior of nglayout.enable_drag_images = false worse or better on balance for that environment?

Comment 26

[Paul Oldham]

1. Just installed it as a Linux app on ChromeOS 74.0.3729.159 and it exhibits the issue there. It also happens on Xubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, which is how I got involved in this bug in the first place (see previous comments on GPU acceleration etc).
2. dragging is pretty much unusable unless you set nglayout.enable_drag_images = false

Comment 27

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

So not sure what you are looking for. On my openSUSE systems (Xfce and Gnome) I have never noticed the intransparent behavior anywhere.
If it's about feedback which presentation I like better than I certainly prefer the old one.
The new half transparent drag of a message list (especially if it's a longer list) is quite hard to get visually because it's actually quite hard to recognize even with transparency what folder is selected in the background. When I first moved to version 60 I though it was a bug in the beginning.

Comment 28

[Tristan Miller]

(In reply to Paul Oldham from comment #26)

1. Just installed it as a Linux app on ChromeOS 74.0.3729.159 and it exhibits the issue there. It also happens on Xubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, which is how I got involved in this bug in the first place (see previous comments on GPU acceleration etc).
2. dragging is pretty much unusable unless you set nglayout.enable_drag_images = false

Same here. I run KDE on openSUSE 15.0 and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Comment 29

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

I can confirm the issue.
I'm on elementary OS 5.0, based on Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS.

After disabling GPU acceleration, dragging is almost unusable.
Setting nglayout.enable_drag_images = false.

Personally, I don't mind having it disabled as it actually makes dragging multiple messages a bit easy, instead of moving around these long ghosted rows.
Would it be possible to detect GPU acceleration and disable/enable that key accordingly?

Comment 31

[Christian Riechers]

As per glxinfo h/w acceleration is enabled here, and I have no intention to turn it off. GPU is Radeon HD 3650, Kernel driver in use: radeon.
I'm not seeing this problem.

Comment 32

[Laszlo Lieszkovszky]

Had the same issue today, Windows 7, TB 60.9.0 32 bit
Dragging-and-dropping messages into folders stopped working out of the blue.
Having hardware acceleration on or off made no difference.
Setting nglayout.enable_drag_images = false fixed it.