544007 - Preferences and other dialogs open on wrong screen

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Martin Gräßlin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; de-DE) AppleWebKit/532.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) rekonq Safari/532.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091216 Iceweasel/3.5.6 (like Firefox/3.5.6; Debian-3.5.6-1)

The preferences dialog, dialogs started from inside the preferences dialog and other dialogs for example the about dialog open on the wrong screen.

That is I have a two screen setup and these dialogs are always opened on the primary screen althoug Firefox is open on the other screen. Further more as window manager I use KWin and KWin is configured to place new windows always on the active screen. Of course when I open the preferences in Firefox on the left screen it is the active screen.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use two screens
2. Place Firefox on the not primary screen
3. Open the preferences dialog or the about dialog
Actual Results:  
Preferences are opened on primary screen

Expected Results:  
Preferences window is not placed manually by Firefox but by the window manager

Dialogs provided by the toolkit such as the File Open dialog are displayed correctly on the primary screen. As a kwin developer I must say that it is a bad idea to overrule the window manager's placing decision. This results in a very inconstent behaviour and unexpected behaviour and for the user broken behaviour. For a tiling window manager such a behaviour is even more a problem as the window manager has to decide if the window should be floating or tiled. In general windows requesting an own geometry should be floating (e.g. application launchers started from the panel) while a preferences window should be tiled.

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Reporter, are you still seeing this issue with Firefox 3.6.13 or later in safe mode? If not, please close. These links can help you in your testing.
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles

You can also try to reproduce in Firefox 4 Beta 8 or later, there are many improvements in the new version, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Comment 2

[Martin Gräßlin]

I'm sorry, but my distribution does not yet offer Firefox 3.6 or Firefox 4. Nevertheless I ask you to not just close the bug report.

For your information on judging on this issue: I am the maintainer of KDE's window manager KWin, which can be considered as the referrence implementation of a window manager under X11. What I reported here is a clear compatability issue.

As another note: KWin will contain a scripting interface in it's upcoming release 4.6. I am rather tempted to include some scripts in future release to fix the most annoying window management related bugs of Firefox. But I think the bugs should be fixed in Firefox and not workarounded by the window managers.

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Can you download and install the official Mozilla build of Firefox, not the distro one? The distro builds have had bugs in them in the past that were not in the official build. Then we can try to narrow down the issue.

Comment 4

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

No reply, INCOMPLETE. Please retest with Firefox 3.6.13 or later and a new profile (http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles). If you continue to see this issue with the newest firefox and a new profile, then please comment on this bug.

Comment 5

[Martin Gräßlin]

I cannot reproduce anymore with Firefox 4, therefore setting to fixed.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks. We use WFM when we don't know which patch fixed the issue