512032 - The title bar does not display proper Chinese characters after opening a PDF file in another tab (with acrobat reader plugin)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Wilson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2

The title bar does not display proper Chinese characters after opening a PDF file in another tab. I showed an example screenshot here (the last post): 

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=fi&forumId=1&comments_parentId=378728



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a Chinese website.
2. Open another PDF website.
3. Recheck the title bar in the tab that is in Chinese.
Actual Results:  
The Chinese characters become question marks.

Expected Results:  
The title bar should display the proper Chinese characters.

Comment 2

[Wilson]

I disagree that this bug is the same one as bug 376559.

The Chinese characters in the Window title bar "was properly displayed" but was erroneous only after opening a PDF file in another tab.



The Chinese (In reply to comment #1)
> 
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 376559 ***

Comment 3

[Szabolcs Horvát]

As Wilson said, this is not a duplicate of bug 376559.

However, bug 458485, bug 508715, bug 530831, bug 532179, and possibly others are most likely duplicates of this bug.  I.e. many people are complaining this issue.

It is a bit difficult to figure out what causes the issue, so not all those other bug reports have a clear description of the problem.  This is the clearest one.

As Wilson notes, if a PDF is opened using the Adobe Reader plugin in a tab of a window, the title bar of that window will not display non-Latin characters any more.  (It will display ? marks instead.)

The problem is still present in Firefox 3.6, as well as in nightly builds when OOPP is turned off.  The version of my Adobe Reader is 9.3.

This is a significant and very annoying issue for those of us who use non-Latin characters.  When this happens (i.e. practically every day for many of us), it's impossible to distinguish between browser windows by looking at the taskbar.  Can someone at least please acknowledge this problem and mark the bug report as confirmed?  The number of reports about this (despite the fact that many of the affected users probably don't speak good enough English to report problems here!) shows that this is a problem for many people.

Comment 4

[Wilson]

I found that this problem can be resolved by a configuration in Windows (I am currently using XP). To resolve this problem, you need to choose Regional and Language Options" in Control Panel, then you click on the "Advanced" tab, then choose an language that is suitable for you at the that options that says "Select a language to match the language version of the non-Unicode programs you want to you".



(In reply to comment #3)
> As Wilson said, this is not a duplicate of bug 376559.
> 
> However, bug 458485, bug 508715, bug 530831, bug 532179, and possibly others
> are most likely duplicates of this bug.  I.e. many people are complaining this
> issue.
> 
> It is a bit difficult to figure out what causes the issue, so not all those
> other bug reports have a clear description of the problem.  This is the
> clearest one.
> 
> As Wilson notes, if a PDF is opened using the Adobe Reader plugin in a tab of a
> window, the title bar of that window will not display non-Latin characters any
> more.  (It will display ? marks instead.)
> 
> The problem is still present in Firefox 3.6, as well as in nightly builds when
> OOPP is turned off.  The version of my Adobe Reader is 9.3.
> 
> This is a significant and very annoying issue for those of us who use non-Latin
> characters.  When this happens (i.e. practically every day for many of us),
> it's impossible to distinguish between browser windows by looking at the
> taskbar.  Can someone at least please acknowledge this problem and mark the bug
> report as confirmed?  The number of reports about this (despite the fact that
> many of the affected users probably don't speak good enough English to report
> problems here!) shows that this is a problem for many people.

Comment 5

[Szabolcs Horvát]

Thanks for the info, but that's not really a solution, it just ameliorates the symptoms a bit.  It forces the user to choose *one* code page that can be displayed correctly, but all the characters not present in it will still be displayed as question marks.  I happen to use two languages with incompatible code pages, so one of them will always be broken.

Please do not mark this bug as 'FIXED' because it is both valid and not fixed (the problem is still present).

Comment 6

[Jo Hermans]

bug 458485 ?

Comment 7

[Szabolcs Horvát]

Jo, I already mentioned that, see comment 3.  There are several complaints about this problem in bugzilla, yet most of them are not marked as duplicates.  This bug has the most clear description of the problem.

Comment 8

[Szabolcs Horvát]

Last time the argument for ignoring this problem was that it didn't appear in the nightlies.  The reason for that was out-of-process plugins.  Now that oopp are only enabled for whitelisted plugins, and Adobe Reader is not among them, the problem is present again (or: still present in stable releases as nothing has changed there), and it seems it's going to stay...

Please consider fixing this very annoying issue.  It makes it very inconvenient to use Firefox for non-English speaking users on non-localised windows systems.

Comment 9

[Jo Hermans]

Firefox 4.0 (currently beta 3) has no whitelisted plugins anymore - dom.ipc.plugins.enabled is set to true, so all plugins are running out-of-process.

Besides, Firefox 4.0 doesn't have a title bar anymore (only the tab title), but that's another issue. But you can still have the problem with the title in the taskbar, if the OS can't display them. Opening a PDF has nothing to do with it. And that's bug 376559 (the original dupe).

Comment 10

[Szabolcs Horvát]

At least the current betas do have a title bar on Windows XP.  Also, the taskbar buttons have the same text as the titlebar.

However if the AR plugin will also run out of process that will hopefully fix this... when Fx 4 is out...

Comment 11

[Jo Hermans]

No, the titlebar (or the task-icons or even the task manager) will still have a problem with these characters, due to bug 376559. Which is caused by the OS. Even Internet Explorer 8 has the same problem.

Comment 12

[Szabolcs Horvát]

This is not bug 376559.  IE8 does not have this problem, it shows unicode characters in the title bar correctly.  Nor does Firefox when the Adobe Reader plugin has not yet been run, or if it is run out of process.

Comment 13

[Jo Hermans]

Attachment: screendump

This shows a Chinese page in Minefield (Firefox 4.0b4pre) and Internet Explore. I don't have the correct fonts installed, so both browser have the problem in the titlebar. Note that Firefox displays it correct on the tab title, while IE doesn't do that either.

Comment 14

[Yuhong Bao]

It looks like the problem is that the Adobe Reader plug-in is forcing the Firefox window to be ANSI, probably because it is subclassing the Firefox window. Subclassing don't work between processes.

Comment 15

[Yuhong Bao]

Just confirmed that it is indeed subclassing by Adobe's PDF plug-in that is causing non-ANSI chars to be lost using a debugger.

Comment 16

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

I'm marking this bug as WONTFIX per bug #1269807.

For more information see - https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/