330454 - Mouse pointer "busy" status / behaviour inconsistent

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Wayne Woods]

This affects both Firefox and SeaMonkey, but I'll leave it listed as a Firefox bug for now.

If a page is loading in a background tab, then the mouse cursor still appears as "busy" (e.g. an arrow with a little spinning wheel on Mac OS X) when you hover over anything but an inactive web page. This includes the tab bar, all other tool bars, and even outside the browser window, even though the foreground tab isn't loading anything. It only appears in its non-busy state when hovering over an actual web page which which isn't currently loading. I presume for the most part that this is the desired activity. (?)

However there's inconsistent behaviour if you open a new tab in the middle of this event. Basically:
-Have multiple tabs open.
-Start a page loading in one.
-Switch to other ones and hover the mouse outside the web page area. Note that the mouse is non-busy inside the page, but busy outside.
-As long as that other page is still loading, create a new tab. Notice that the mouse now appears as non-busy everywhere you place it, unless you go back to the actively loading tab. So this is inconsistent with its previous behaviour.

In addition to that... (maybe the following should be a separate bug, not sure)

If the behaviour described initially is intended, I still think it would be useful if the mouse pointer never appeared busy when hovering over the tab bar area of non-loading tabs. But if it's not intended (so the mouse shouldn't appear busy outside the area of the loading page) then I think it would be useful if the mouse still did appear busy when hovering over a loading tab in the tab bar.

Comment 1

[alan.winter]

THis may be associated:

Load this up in one tab : http://www.nga.gov/kids/zone/paintbox.htm - this paintbox has a pencil to do drawings with.

Load an ordinary page up in another tab.

The mouse pointer behaviour changes to a flickering pencil in "another tab" in certain spots on the screen

Comment 2

[Wayne Woods]

Interesting. That seems to be a form of "bleed-through" of the effects of the Shockwave plugin. Which operating system are you using? And which version of Firefox? I suspect what you're seeing is bug 233780 (that mentions Flash, not Shockwave, but close enough).

Comment 3

[alan.winter]

Seen effect on Windows XP, Windows ME, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3 
Can't say if its the same as bug 233780

Comment 4

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

"fixed" by bug 481359