473918 - Permit topmost noautohide popup panels

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: UI Widgets, enhancement)

Description

[Paul Gideon Dann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120121 Firefox/3.0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3 XPCOMViewer/1.0a1

According to the documentation on MDC, it's not currently possible to open a popup panel with the attributes level="top" and noautohide="true" both set.  However, this feature is badly needed for the official eBay Sidebar extension, in order to provide eBay-related alerts to the user on the desktop.

The story so far:
Having noticed bug 448929, we decided to try using it to our advantage.  We use the onpopupshowing event to set noautohide="true" on the panel.  This works well in MacOS X, but not in Windows and Linux.  The latter two stop processing mouse events.  See screencast: http://www.screencast.com/t/QEBL8JGes

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open popup panel with level="top" and noautohide="true"
Actual Results:  
Panel does not remain on top.

Expected Results:  
Panel should remain on top.

Comment 1

[Neil Deakin]

What needs to happen here is to separate the click-outside-doesn't-close the panel and the panel is dependent of parent aspects into two separate things.