439979 - Not always MacOSX Cocoa widgets in pulldown menus

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 394067

(Core :: Widget, defect)

Description

[Rotis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0

Firefox 3.0 has now pretty Cocoa widgets, buttons and boxes and pulldown menus like MacOSX has. But the pulldown menu widgets not always have the Cocoa design. In fact they look in many cases like ugly Netscape widgets of 1997-stone-age.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
2. Move your eyeballs to the upper right corner of the page
3. Shudder in shocking paralysis

Comment 1

[Rotis]

Attachment: The ugly pulldown widgets

Comment 2

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

This is by design -- comboboxes (aka drop-down lists) are intended to (and do) look the same on all platforms.  On OS X they're actually not native comboboxes at all, but customized.  I suspect that's also true for the other platforms.

Comment 3

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

As I said, this is by design and cross-platform.

I honestly don't know how to classify this ... but the classification shouldn't be platform-specific.

Comment 4

[Chris Blore]

This is really the correct behaviour as it is the same on most browsers and all platforms, although I believe Safari "fakes it" and uses Cocoa widgets anyway. I believe this is therefore a WONTFIX and I'm sure this is also a dupe...

Comment 5

[Rotis]

Where is the problem with Cocoa widgets there? With FF 1.5 and FF 2.0 I was using a widget patcher named Firefoxy. It replaced the ugly Netscape like buttons, boxes and pulldown menus by not so ugly MacOS 9 ones. Anywhere. Even those "comboboxes". I never felt anything missing. That is probably the reason, when Safari "fakes it". Are those comboboxes anything different from normal pulldown menus?

Comment 6

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This is by design -- comboboxes (aka drop-down lists) are intended to (and do)
> look the same on all platforms.

Hu? As long as the <select>'s border or background haven't been styled, the combobox button looks very Cocoa-y to me. Why shouldn't that apply to its popup menu as well?

I really think we should try to get a native look and feel here, especially for comboboxes in XUL.

Comment 7

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

(In reply to comment #6)

Please give examples of comboboxes that look different on different
platforms.  And (if you can find any) please be specific as to what
the differences are.

> I really think we should try to get a native look and feel here,
> especially for comboboxes in XUL.

This would be a major change from current design principles (going
back at least co FF2).

Comment 8

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

(Following up comment #7)

Alright, I grant you that this bug's example's combobox has a slightly
different button style on Windows (though it appears to be exactly the
same on Linux as it is on OS X).

And perhaps some other changes might be made to make comboboxes look
slightly more Mac-like -- hopefully at the theme level.  But there's a
big difference between doing that and actually using native controls.
Using native controls would be a lot more trouble, and would be a big
change from past behavior (which has strongly emphasized
cross-platform uniformity of "look and feel").

Comment 9

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Attachment: Cocoa-y combobox buttons in Firefox

Clearly I'm misunderstanding something here.

Comment 10

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Of course I'm not advocating the use of native controls - just emulating the look and feel of them, as we're doing with all the other widgets.
For combobox menus that means:
 (1) using context menu-styled background,
 (2) rounded corners on Leopard (once we support them for context menus) and
 (3) positioning the menu on top of the combobox button so that the selected
     option is directly above the button.

Surely there's more, but these are the most obvious deviations.

Comment 11

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

(In reply to comment #8)

You appear to be talking about the comboboxes that appear at the top
of this bug's display.  If so, I stand corrected -- clearly _some_
comboboxes look more Mac-like than others.  But _none_ of them are
native controls.

So the question becomes, what's the difference between the comboboxes
at the top of this page and this bug's example combobox?

I'm really out of my depth here (I ususally work at a much lower
level) -- I simply don't know.

Comment 12

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

I misunderstood the bug, sorry.

rotis: Firefox has two ways of rendering native controls like comboboxes:
 (1) the platform-native look and
 (2) a generic fallback look.

By default, all widgets are rendered with the platform-native look. However, as soon as a website tries to change the background or the border of such a control, Firefox falls back to the generic look - only the fallback look can be styled in such a way.

In the huffingtonpost's case, it's the following declaration that makes us fall back to the cross-platform rendering:

select{border:1px solid #aaa;} (somewhere in the first line of the stylesheet)

Comment 13

[Stuart Morgan]

Isn't the basic complaint here just bug 394067?

Comment 14

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Yes, that's it.

Comment 15

[Intermittent Failures Robot]

1 failures in 632 pushes (0.002 failures/push) were associated with this bug in the last 7 days.    

Repository breakdown:
* autoland: 1

Platform breakdown:
* windows10-64: 1

For more details, see:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/intermittent-failures.html#/bugdetails?bug=439979&startday=2018-05-21&endday=2018-05-27&tree=trunk