1569410 - Impossible to debug extension popups with new about:debugging

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(DevTools :: about:debugging, task, P2)

Description

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

What were you doing?

Please tell us what site you were on, and what steps led to the error you are reporting

1. Install a webextension with a popup (eg https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/myqonly/ )
2. Open about:debugging
3. Click [inspect] for the extension
4. Disable popup auto-hide
5. Open the extension's popup
6. Select the popup's frame in the toolbox frame chooser

What happened?

The frame chooser popup never disappears and you can't interact with the about:devtools-toolbox tab anymore.

What should have happened?

We should have a way to disable popup auto hide only for the extension we are debugging, so that it doesn't affect the toolbox? Or about:devtools-toolbox should be isolated from this setting?

Anything else we should know?

This used to "work" when devtools' was spawning a new firefox instance to create the "addon debugging toolbox". Since we switched to use a toolbox living in the same firefox as the extension, the toolbox also gets affected by the "Disable popup autohide" toggle.

Comment 1

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

Luca, do you have any bug already filed to improve the UX of extension popup debugging? Anything that would be relevant here?

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug is a task, but please change it back in case of error.

Comment 4

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

(In reply to Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] from comment #1)

Luca, do you have any bug already filed to improve the UX of extension popup debugging? Anything that would be relevant here?

I took a look if there is any existing bug filed related to the UX of the extension popup debugging, but the only issues related to the behaviors of the "popup autohide toggle button" that I found is Bug 1392072 ("When popup autohide is off page actions don't hide when clicking them").

(Nevertheless I'm still pretty sure that we have been discussing about it before in some other bugzilla issues, e.g. about including a "Inspect" action in the context menu for the extension popup windows, which I think Chrome provides as the only way to open the developer tools on an extension window).

An alternative approach may be to

• set the noautohide property only on the popups related to the extension targeted by the "addon debugging toolbox" (instead of globally using the "ui.popup.noautohide" preference)
• and then hide those popups when the related browserAction/pageAction action is clicked again (as also suggested in Bug 1392072), or when the extension is shutting down
• and remove the noautohide property from the extension popups when the toolbox is destroyed

Comment 5

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

For now I propose we stop applying the autohide to DevTools HTML tooltips and figure out a fix in a follow up.

Comment 7

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

Attachment: Bug 1569410 - Do not apply disable_autohide to DevTools HTML tooltips

Comment 8

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/3290214a8054
Do not apply disable_autohide to DevTools HTML tooltips r=pbro

Comment 9

[Cosmin Sabou [:CosminS]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3290214a8054