275753 - about dialog should not be modal

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Jamie Zawinski]

You can't type into other Firefox windows when the About Mozilla Firefox dialog
is up.  Among other things, this means that I can't:

  - bring up the about dialog
  - select the version string text
  - paste it here in bugzilla

Modal dialogs bad.  Baaad.


Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Related (in the "I'm not in the mood to dup either one of you" sense): bug 250077

Comment 2

[Ben Fowler]

See also http://pasteip.mozdev.org/ 

Comment 3

[(no longer active)]

Is there any special reason why this dialog has to be modal?  Bug 267227 moved openAboutDialog() from browser.js to utilitOverlay.js (see the original version in browser.js: <http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsblame.cgi?file=/mozilla/browser/base/content/browser.js&rev=1.402#2758>).  I was able to track the change to here: <http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsview2.cgi?diff_mode=context&whitespace_mode=show&root=/cvsroot&subdir=/mozilla/browser/base/content&command=DIFF_FRAMESET&file=browser.js&rev2=1.34&rev1=1.33>.  The changelog for rev 34 is: "Add note about a workaround." (<http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvslog.cgi?file=/mozilla/browser/base/content/browser.js&rev=1.34>) which doesn't help a lot...

Does anybody know why this dialog should not be modal?  I have a simple patch which I will attach shortly which makes this non-modal, and I can't seem to find any problem with a non-modal dialog.  It only simplifies the use cases such as that in comment 0.

Comment 4

[(no longer active)]

Attachment: Patch (v1)

Trivial patch to make the about dialog non-modal.

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Comment on attachment 296379 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch (v1)

Better to get ui-review on these kinds of changes before asking for code review.

Comment 6

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

After a lot of looking, I finally found a single non-modal About on Windows - the supremely non-native Safari.

On Linux, which was what jwz cared about and filed this bug on (and which should thus prevent a wontfix when someone decides we don't want to follow Safari for Windows behavior), the correct behavior would be more like the Help window is on Windows - not modal, but always raised.

Comment 7

[(no longer active)]

Gavin: will you have some cycles to review this patch?

Comment 8

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Checking in browser/base/content/utilityOverlay.js;
/cvsroot/mozilla/browser/base/content/utilityOverlay.js,v  <--  utilityOverlay.js
new revision: 1.61; previous revision: 1.60
done

Comment 9

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

verified fixed using Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008021904 Minefield/3.0b4pre. Also verified on Mac using the nightly.