317030 - Hot-switching themes doesn't work (yet?)

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 226791

(Core Graveyard :: Skinability, defect)

Description

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051118 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051118 Firefox/1.5

Clicking "Use Theme" now tries to apply the theme at once (where previously a restart was required). However, this doesn't always work: sometimes the new theme displays correctly, sometimes the buttons are functional but their labels aren't shown, sometimes the display is so bad that the only thing still usable is the red X at the right end of the browser titlebar.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install several themes from the pages starting at https://addons.mozilla.org/themes/
2. Tools -> Themes
3. Select a different theme.
4. Click "Use Theme" at bottom.
5. If the display looks OK, repeat starting at step 3 above.

Actual Results:  
The display is not always correct, especially the toolbars at top of the main window but in pathological cases everything including the contents of the Themes window.

Expected Results:  
Either display everything all right, or (as before) don't actually apply the new theme until the browser is closed and restarted.


Actual build used: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051118 Firefox/1.5 ID:2005111803

This bug is "almost" solid: it happens more often than not (at least on my system). The software doesn't crash, but sometimes it's so bad that maybe it ought to.

I got it with practically every theme I checked. When repeatedly hot-switching themes without restarting, it gets worse.

My worst case was by switching from ISNO 1.2a to BlackJapan 1.0.3 after a long tabbed-browsing session had brought memory use to something like 500 MB for Firefox alone and 300 MB for everything else together. In that particular case, not only the toolbar buttons but also the menus and even the HTML links all stopped working; and all text suddenly got displayed in Times New Roman black on white. My only resource in that case was to close the browser using the red X button at the right end of its main window's titlebar.

In all cases I've seen so far, restarting the browser cures the problem.

Comment 1

[Elmar Ludwig]

AFAIK live theme switching is still disabled by default because it doesn't work correctly (see bug 226791). Did you enable this in about:config?

Comment 2

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> AFAIK live theme switching is still disabled by default because it doesn't work
> correctly (see bug 226791). Did you enable this in about:config?
> 

AFAIK, I didn't set it; however I have

extensions.dss.enabled     user set     boolean     true

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction; I'm toggling this pref for now. Maybe some extension had set it on?

I'm also marking this bug as a dupe of bug 226791

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 226791 ***