287692 - Multiple proxy dialog boxes

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Walt Stoneburner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

Each morning when I first unlock my computer to resume using it from the night
before, I notice that the FireFox process in the Windows task area is wildly
flickering, and that FireFox has a proxy dialog box open -- pressing filling in
the information and pressing OK or just pressing Cancel seems to do nothing. 
*This is a symptom and not the problem.*  Either FireFox has to be killed from
the task manager, or I have to click Cancel dozens of times before FireFox
returns to normal operations.  Sound familiar to bug 253632?  That bug is a
symptom of this bug.

The environment which this surfaces is where I use a proxy and have the
ForecastFox 0.5.9 extension installed.  Note, this is not an extension bug.

When I leave my machine at night, without shutting down FireFox nor logging out,
ForecastFox continues to request pages to display the weather in the status bar.
 However, after a certain amount of time, our corporate proxy server times out
my session and asks me to reauthenticate, only I'm not around to do it, and the
dialog box pops up.

More time passes, and ForecastFox requests another web update, and again another
proxy dialog box pops up.

This happens all throughout the night, and when I return in the morning, unlock
the machine, I see what looks like a proxy timeout dialog.  What I'm really
seeing is a bunch of proxy dialog boxes stacked perfectly on top of one another.

As I respond to a dialog box, filling it out or pressing cancel, it clears that
dialog box, showing me the one under it, giving me the illusion nothing has
happened.  

As such, I either terminate FireFox prematurely in frustration, or repeatedly
click Cancel until I clear out the dialog pile, "mysteriously" returning FireFox
to normality.

How could FireFix prevent this problem?  Two ways.

1) Each time the proxy dialog box is displayed, rather than centering it,
provide some slight random offset (10 or 20 pixels) off center.  Visually, it
won't be noticable unless there are several dialog boxes stacked -- then users
would know what's going on, and the actual problem would have been reported
sooner and accurately.

2) The real solution, however, is to have FireFox keep track if it has presented
the dialog box already.  If it has, it should not present another one.  This
way, despite being non-modal in nature, the user only has one dialog box to ever
contend with.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use an authenticating proxy server 
2. Install ForecastFox
3. Let the proxy server time out the authentication and a dialog box appears.
4. Let ForecastFox continue requesting pages, which make more dialog boxes.
Actual Results:  
You get a stack of proxy authentication dialog boxes at the same coordinates,
giving the illusion of one dialog box.  The resulting interface is confusing for
the user to resolve.  

Expected Results:  
FireFix should show one -and only one- proxy authentication dialog box at a
time, if it's already presented, bring it to the top and give it focus, do not
create additional ones.

The work around is to simply hit Cancel a zillion times, or
remove the ForecastFox extension (or any others that auto-load pages), or
stop using an authenticating proxy.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.