586716 - Firefox 4 title bar/tab bar graphics glitch when Aero effects get disabled due to a plugin

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Utku Altunkaya]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b3) Gecko/20100805 Firefox/4.0b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b3) Gecko/20100805 Firefox/4.0b3

Sometimes a plugin (especially Flash video players embedded in webpages) can cause the browser window to lose its Aero Glass effects and revert to the Classic theme (see bug 545892).

For Firefox 3.6.x series this may be a minor inconvenience, since all you get is browser with a less fancy titlebar.

However, with the new Tabs-On-Top UI of Firefox 4, this unintentional switch to Classic theme wreaks havoc with the user interface:
* When the browser window is NOT maximized, the titlebar reverts to the Classic look and overlaps the tab bar. When you hover over the tab bar, the tabs get fully drawn over the titlebar. When you switch to another tab, this updates the browser window's title and thus repaints the titlebar, and the tabs are covered by the titlebar again. The new Firefox button also disappears and reappears in a similar fashion.
* When the browser window is maximized, the titlebar and tab bar background turns fully transparent, and whatever is behind the browser window shows through. When a tab switch occurs, the titlebar is repainted but window title text stays transparent. Top several pixel lines of the content area also has a strange translucency.

Minimize/maximize buttons do not function in both cases, but maximize/restore is possible by double-clicking on the titlebar.

Quitting and re-launching the browser fixes the issue (until a plugin disables Aero again).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Browse several webpages that contains a Flash-based embedded video player (Facebook is a good example) until Aero suddenly gets disabled for the browser window.
Actual Results:  
The UI glitches described in the Details section are observed.

Expected Results:  
Although not disastrous, this is a negative point for the consistency and stability of the new look & feel of the browser. The browser could have handled this sudden loss of Aero effects more gracefully, perhaps by switching to a UI implementation compatible with the Windows Classic theme.

I'm using a Core2 Duo laptop with integrated Intel 965 Express Chipset graphics. My OS is Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

I experienced this glitch in both Firefox 4.0b2 and 4.0b3 (official en-US builds) using the default theme with no Personas installed, with Adobe Flash plugin v10.1 r53 and now with r82.

Comment 1

[Utku Altunkaya]

Attachment: Maximized window - Screenshot #1

Comment 2

[Utku Altunkaya]

Attachment: Maximized window - Screenshot #2

Notice the transparency of text just below the Bookmarks toolbar.

Comment 3

[Utku Altunkaya]

Attachment: Maximized window - Screenshot #3

That's Outlook 2010 in the background. However, the thin stripe below the Bookmarks toolbar has a scaled down image of the Firefox tab bar on top of the Outlook window image. Strange...

Comment 4

[Utku Altunkaya]

Attachment: Regular window - Screenshot #1

Comment 5

[Utku Altunkaya]

Attachment: Regular window - Screenshot #2

Comment 6

[tonyv]

This is a duplicate of #545892. (sorry, I don't have bits to update bug status...)

Comment 7

[Utku Altunkaya]

This bug is dependent on bug 545892, but I think of it more as a complement rather than a duplicate. Even if bug 545892 is not / cannot be fixed, having a fallback mechanism for the Firefox 4 UI to draw properly in forced Classic theme mode would improve the user experience, as the users will then see just a classic style window instead of a broken UI.

Comment 8

[Johan Cronje]

I am also getting this bug -- Windows 7 x64 with FF 4.0b6.

Comment 9

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

I agree with comment 7 ftr. Although bug 545892 is blocking 2.0, it would be worthwhile to investigate this bug.

Comment 10

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Unfortunately our composition detection is tied to desktop settings, and is cached in a static array. So it doesn't work on a per window basis. We could support this with some work, but since the aero bug is blocking, I'd prefer to concentrate on getting that fixed instead.

Comment 11

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

We shouldn't try to work around our bugs - we should just fix the real bug, which is bug 545892.