513506 - Presentation Mode with multiple screens: duplicate/mirror main window to secondary screen-.

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[David Gasperoni]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; it; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; it; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2

Especially with laptops, when we have a presentation in front of an audience, and we want to show a website with Firefox, we want to be able to see the website on our monitor while the audience can also see what we are browsing on the secondary screen.

A workaround to this is to duplicate the screen, which is not always a good idea: the primary monitor resolution is deprecated, plus we end up showing our clattered desktop (especially on MacOSX, where there's no real full screen to cover the dock for example), especially when we setup a presentation where what we want to show is on the secondary screen, while our notes and informations are on the main screen.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Attach a secondary screen (no duplication).
2. Open a Firefox window on main screen.
3. Move the window from one screen to another.
Actual Results:  
We cannot get the window on both screens simultaneously, so nothing happens on the secondary screen (ideally a projector) where our presentation is shown. The windows only stays on one screen, not on two. We could put it on the secondary screen, but then we don't have the window on our main screen.

Expected Results:  
My suggestion is to have a "Presentation Mode", where a new window is created in the secondary screen (with an easy option to go fullscreen), and what this window only does is to mirror the original window on the main screen.

It's like in PowerPoint or Keynote: on the secondary screen there is the slide, on the main screen there are presenter's tools. In this case, the presenter's tools are simply the Firefox navigation window.

Comment 1

[Stirling Westrup]

This is a long-standing bug in Linux as well as MacOS. It exists in at least versions 12 to 22 for at least Debian, Gentoo and CentOS.

Basically, Firefox cannot handle independant X screens that are not joined by Xinerama. So, if you have a firefox session open on :0.0 and wish to open a window on :0.1, you cannot do it, nor can you run a second independant firefox session on :0.1. In both cases such attempts results in the (erroneous) error message that "Firefox is already running, but is not responding." when, in fact, its (otherwise) running and responding fine.

Comment 2

[KLB]

With multiple monitors becoming more prevalent this seems like it could be a very useful feature, especially when giving presentations.