440226 - Many themes marked as Firefox 3-compatible are actually platform-specific and are not compatible with Macs (themes can make the vertical scollbar disappear)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Administration, defect)

Description

[Corey Cohen]

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

If I use any other firefox 3 compatible theme other than the default firefox 3 theme for mac os x, my vertical scroll bar disappears from all firefox windows on all sites.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install or use a firefox 3 compatible theme other than the default
2.restart the browser
Actual Results:  
the vertical scroll bar disappears

Expected Results:  
the scroll bar should not disappear

happens when using any and all firefox 3 compatible themes other than the default theme

Comment 1

[Kai Liu]

Could you please post the names of the themes that didn't work, as well as the theme that did work (the Firefox 2 theme that you said in IRC worked when you used NTT to force compat.)?

Comment 2

[Corey Cohen]

Themes that did not work (caused the scroll bar to disappear):
All of the Aero Fox themes
All of the Aquatint Themes
CrystalFox Modern
Kempelton
Phoenity Reborn

Firefox 2 themes that worked using NTT force compat (scroll bar did not disappear, but other issues warranted not using them):
Blue Ice 2
GreenShift
Foxdie
Modern Style

Comment 3

[Kai Liu]

The problem here is that all of the themes that the reporter tried are based on winstripe, which means that they are also pulling in stuff from <toolkit/themes/winstripe/global>.  In the past, this hasn't been a problem, but as we rely more and more on native widget themeing, toolkit/themes have become increasingly platform-dependent.  In this specific case, the winstripe scrollbars.css is simply not compatible with Macs because it is dependent on things not supported by Cocoa widgets.  Transplanting the scrollbars.css from the pinstripe into one of the non-working themes solved the problem for the reporter (over IRC).

So I think we need to do two things here:

1) Audit the themes marked as compatible with Firefox 3, and themes that are incompatible with Macs (such as the ones listed in comment 2) should be marked as Windows- and Linux-only, and if possible, contact the affected theme authors and let them know that if they want to support Macs, they have to either produce a separate Mac version (which is what Camifox does) or style their scrollbars without the use of native widgets (which I believe is what Classic Compact does).

2) Let the editors know about this so that they can check for this before approving a theme.

I can also add a blurb about this to dev.m.o when I get a chance...


--> Moving to AMO...

Comment 4

[Kai Liu]

One easy way for extension authors to make their themes Mac-compatible without releasing an entirely new version or using non-native widgets is this:

1) Package all Mac-specific files in the theme, in a directory of their own.

2) Use the chrome manifest to override the appropriate file(s) in global with the Mac-specific versions with the following flags:
os=Darwin appversion>=3.0

Comment 6

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Kai, I'd like to focus on 3.1 moving forward.  Please reopen this if you would be willing to help with the steps in comment #3.