527204 - Modality of "Options..." and child dialogs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Nikita Popov]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091105 Minefield/3.7a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091105 Minefield/3.7a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Why is the "Options..." dialog modal? No changed in the options dialog will result in an immediate change of rendering of tabs or other parts of the window. So I don't understand why it should block the rest of the window. Furthermore, if you are new to Firefox and you use a tutorial to change some props you can't switch between the tut and the options dialog (that's not quite comfortable). The only thing you could do is open another window of Firefox and change the options there.
So I think the options shouldn't be modal.

And another problem with child dialogs:
If I open the "Add-ons" dialog from the options dialog there are all three controls - close, full size and minimize - but at least the minimize-control doesn't make any sense. If I minimize the addon dialog I still can't do anything in the options dialog, because the addon dialog is modal, too. Why? If I open the addon dialog from the menu "Tools" it isn't modal. But from "Options" it is. Doesn't make any sense to me...
(All the other dialogs opened from "Options" that have these three controls aren't modal.)

And last: In the "Advanced" tab of "Options" many buttons haven't got the "..." at the end, even tough they open a new dialog.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[David Balažic]

Modal windows are evil.

If anyone is reading this, here is a workaround:
 - open a new FF window (ctrl-N)
 - open the Options dialog there

Now you can have the Option dialog open and use the previous FF window(s) at the same time.
Which also proves that it being modal makes no sense.