297421 - open link in new tab causes focus rects to remain when switching tabs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Jason Ellis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050610 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050610 Firefox/1.0+

When selecting tabs that were opened from links, a focus rectangle appears on
the tab and stays until another tab is selected.  I've seen this issue since bug
179656 was resolved.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.google.com/
2. Right-click on "Images" and select "open link in new tab"
3. Right-click on "Groups" and select "open link in new tab"
4. Click on the tab maked "Google Image Search"

Actual Results:  
Tab is selected and focus rectangle appears around "Google Image Search" text in tab

Expected Results:  
Tab is selected and focus rectangle does not appear around "Google Image Search"
text in tab

Comment 1

[Jason Ellis]

Attachment: screenshot of tab focus rectangle issue

Comment 2

[José Jeria]

This used to happen on the second click, now its focused with only one click

Comment 3

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

I see this behaviour, too (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050613 Firefox/1.0+) but it's not just for tabs that were
created by using the "Open in New Tab". Tabs created by "New Tab" and then
manually entering a URL seem to be affected as well.

Confusingly, it doesn't *always* seem to happen. I've got 7 tabs open now, and
clicking on one sometimes ends up with the focus rect showing yet not active, as
the arrow keys do nothing, and not disappearing when I click inside the page;
sometimes it doesn't.

The behaviour, as expressed above, should be:

  - first click on a tab switches that tab to the front, puts UI focus on the
page in the tab, does not show focus rect
  - second click on a tab shows the focus rect, and the UI responds to
left/right keyboard arrows as moving between tabs

(note: re: comment 2, it's actually not in focus, as the behaviour I'm seeing is
that first click shows the focus rect, but doesn't actually put focus on the tab
switching component - ie, left/right keyboard arrows don't switch between tabs)

Comment 4

[Wolf [:wolf]]

CC'ing mconnor, who finally could reproduce the bogus focus ring bug earlier. :-)

Far as I can tell though, its not directly related to open link in new tab.
Since I can reproduce it with just new tabs.
I agree that Comment #3 is the expected behavior, at least, IMO.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Oy.

This is a new feature, but the focus is not as good as it should be.  We don't
have the XP focus mechanism where focus rings aren't drawn if the action is
mouse-initiated.  Maybe we should, but that isn't a blocker for 1.1.

However, weird focus behaviour on clicking on tabs should be fixed by beta (a2
may be too aggressive, but if aaronlev has time for this, that'd be great).

Comment 6

[Jason Ellis]

Thread with some potential fixes...
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=280710

Comment 7

[James Ross]

Ok, I've worked out when the focus rect appears on a tab but does not actually
have focus (a false focus rect).

It happens if you click on a tab, and the focus is placed on the /page/ in that
tab. If anything in the page gets the focus instead (link, textbox, button,
etc.), the tab does not show the false focus rect.

It could be some race between the click/mouseup focusing the tab and the
tab-switch setting the focus to the page, though why it only happens when the
page is being focused is beyond me.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050708
Firefox/1.0+

Comment 8

[José Jeria]

*** Bug 301462 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** Bug 301763 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Aaron Leventhal]

In fact there is a similar regression in tab in dialogs. It used to be that if
you switched tabs and a tab wasn't previously focused, it would just switch to
the tab but keep focus on content. Now it focus the new tab label right away.

I think it will prove to be the same regression.

Comment 11

[Aaron Leventhal]

Here's the regression:
1.24	mconnor%steelgryphon.com	2005-06-06 19:17	 	bug 295721 - improvements to
tabbox to better match native focus/activation behaviour, r=vlad, a=shaver

The change that regressed it was going from a click handler to mousedown:
      <handler event="mousedown" button="0">
      <![CDATA[
        this.parentNode.selectNewTab(this);
      ]]>
If you change mousedown back to click the bug is fixed.

Comment 12

[James Ross]

I think bug 300958 was filed after a discussion on IRC with mconnor where we
came to the same conclusion about the cause. It seems like these are actually dups.

Comment 13

[Aaron Leventhal]

Attachment: Change mousedown handling so that if tab hasn't been selected yet, we prevent default focus behavior on it

Comment 14

[Aaron Leventhal]

*** Bug 300958 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Aaron Leventhal]

Checking in tabbox.xml;
/cvsroot/mozilla/toolkit/content/widgets/tabbox.xml,v  <--  tabbox.xml
new revision: 1.27; previous revision: 1.26
done

Comment 16

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

From the patch..

// Only a click on an already selected tab should focus the tab itself.

Right now, if you click the selected tab, the focus rectangle appears. But if
you then click on another tab, the focus rectangle moves to the new tab as well
as activates the tab. This doesn't quite follow the comment in the patch. Is it
supposed to work this way or as the comment says?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050802 Firefox/1.0+

Comment 17

[Aaron Leventhal]

(In reply to comment #16)
> Right now, if you click the selected tab, the focus rectangle appears. But if
> you then click on another tab, the focus rectangle moves to the new tab as well
> as activates the tab. 
That's also by design. It's a secondary rule. If you select another tab via
keyboard or mouse and one of the tabs is already focused, then the new tab gets
focused. This works similar to tabs in MS Windows.

Comment 18

[Cameron Dawson [:camd]]

Litmus Test Case Added:
https://litmus.mozilla.org/show_test.cgi?id=10076