631462 - Tooltip keep showing when switch to another application

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jake]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b11

When you switch to another application, and at the exact same time (maybe ms) trigering a tooltip of FF, the tooltip will keep showing over the other application, and it will never disappear unless you switch to FF again.
The sad part is that you can't reproduce it intentionally, but if you konw the code of FF well, I believe you can imagine it.
Iv been encountering this problem for a long time, but I figure it's quite obvious and common (I come across it every other day, maybe I switch a bit too often),so it will be fixed eventually, but untill now, the beta11 have bas been released, it still exists.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jake]

I think there are three ways to fix it.
1.Do not show tooltips when FF is unfocused. I can hardly imagine why someone want to see the tooptips when they are currently on another application.
2.Show tooltips when FF is unfocused, but don't cover the activated application (don't on top of everthing).
3.When FF is unfocused, still detect mouse movement, so you can know mouse is already moved out of the area that could triger tooltips.

Comment 2

[Jake]

Actually you can reproduce it on purpose. I just did it, it may take quite a few trys.

Comment 3

[Maniac Vlad Florin (:vladmaniac)]

Jake, could you please provide us some steps to reproduce? it will be very helpful, thanks!

Comment 4

[Jake]

Ok, but I think the basic reason is that when FF is not focused (unactivated) you can still triger the tooltips of FF, so you can try this: open another application(e.g. NOTEPAD.EXE),switch to FF then switch back in order to keep Notepad the activated App and FF is in the background. by default the Notepad is not in maximized mode, so you can drag it very close to the nav-bar of FF, preferably cover half of the nav-bar, then move your mouse over a nav-bar item(say Home button), you will see the tooltip of Home button are covering Notepad. Now you might already know why this bug occurs. To exactly reproduce the scenario I reported, you need quickly move your mouse to Notepad when the tooltip just appears, the trick is "keep trying". And the slower your CPU is the higher chances of it occuring. so you might need opening some high CPU consuming applications on the background, otherwise you may never see it happen.

Comment 5

[Jake]

I tried a bunch of applications, not a single one of them whose tooltips can still be trigered when they are unfocused. FF is exceptional. I really can't see the point of this design.

Comment 6

[Jake]

Now I get a hang of it, every three trying I can reproduce once, timing is crucial.

Comment 7

[Jake]

Another trick is "try another button", because when a tootip's already showed, it will be in the memory, next time it will appear too quick for you to move your mouse out. maybe what we need is a little delay.

Comment 8

[orangezilla]

Voted, often happens to me when I maximise DVBViewer, end up getting the "Search using Bing" tooltip sticking over the video.

Comment 9

[alex_mayorga]

Attachment: Screen capture of the problem.

I can reproduce this always on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110222 Firefox/4.0b12pre ID:20110222030357

As you can see from the screen capture the tool tip appears on top of another window that's currently focused.

Comment 10

[Greg Edwards]

Attachment: Screen capture of the issue

I can make this happen reliably:
1. Drag another window so that it partially overlaps the toolbar button.
2. Without focusing Firefox, hover the mouse over the button.
3. Without leaving the area of the button, move the mouse into the foreground window.

The tooltip will not disappear until either you mouse over it or move the mouse back into the Firefox window.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Comment 11

[davidgreig]

Attachment: Screen Capture of Issue

I have the same problem but am running Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and FF 4.0.1

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

I have the same problem, also running Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and FF 4.0.1. It's not just the page tooltips, though, but the pop-ups created by extensions in the status bar. These appear in front of other applications when Firefox is not in the foreground (so they mask the other application), and are incredibly annoying.

Comment 13

[Ted Anderson]

This is also in Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and FF 5.0.

Comment 14

[davidgreig]

(In reply to comment #13)
> This is also in Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and FF 5.0.

Agreed - Same problem persists with 5.0 and Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and 10.6.8.

Comment 15

[alex_mayorga]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Created attachment 514204 [details]
> Screen capture of the problem.
> 
> I can reproduce this always on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0b12pre)
> Gecko/20110222 Firefox/4.0b12pre ID:20110222030357
> 
> As you can see from the screen capture the tool tip appears on top of
> another window that's currently focused.

Still reproducible on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:8.0a1) Gecko/20110726 Firefox/8.0a1 ID:20110726030825

Comment 16

[skmail]

Still reproducible with Firefox 14.01 on Windows XP (x86) and quite annoying. Almost every minimizing of Firefox leaves a Firefox tooltip on the desktop or any other application getting the focus.

Please consider adding a preference like 'applicationBlurDelay = n[ms]'. It should define the time to wait before Firefox starts actions resulting in loosing the focus (like minimize or exit). So the application has enough time to remove the tooltip - before further painting operations would be impossible.

Comment 17

[Greg Edwards]

My previous replication method seems to be fixed but I've found another one:

1. Maximize Firefox.
2. Display the Add-on Bar if not already.
3. Set the Windows taskbar to show on the bottom if not already.
4. Switch to a different application.
5. Focus Firefox by clicking in the main view area.
6. Move the mouse over the Add-on Bar's close button.
7. Before the tooltip appears, move the mouse further down onto the taskbar.

The "Close Add-on Bar" tooltip should remain onscreen and never go away until you move the mouse back into the Firefox window.

Comment 19

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 12 votes.
:mossop, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 20

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.

Comment 21

[Allan Macdonald]

Happening on 108.0.2 (64-bit) under Ubuntu 20.04LTS (focal):

1. Open any gnome application (LO writer or geany).

2. Open firefox.

3. Unmaximize firefox window

4. Drag the firefox window width until address in url bar is truncated.

5. Hover the mouse over the address bar to bring up the tooltip showing the full url.

6. alt-tab to another application

7. Observe that the tool tip persists and obscures the content of the other application.

8. Click anywhere in the other application and the firefox tooltip still remains.

This also happens when hovering over the url bar lock, icon, shield, star, zoom icons the search bar, save top pocket download and hamburger icons. However, the bug becomes really annoying when a the mouse has hovered over a google search result because these urls are very long and the resulting tooltip can cover a huge proportion of the desktop display area.

I'm not a gui programmer so forgive me for spitballing here but I suppose that the tooltip is a gnome (x-windows, whatever) element called by firefox. Firefox knows how to remove tooltips when the mouse moves away from the element that generated it. Does the firefox app get a notification from gnome that it has lost focus? Why can't firefox then tell gnome to clear any currently active tooltip? Seems like a pretty easy change here for a not damaging but very visually annoying bug.

Comment 22

[Allan Macdonald]

I just checked and this seems to be fixed in MS-Windoze-10 (108.0.2 64 bit) so now is this only limited to linux machines? Regression maybe?

Comment 23

[fanzhuyifan+github]

Is this still reproducible in firefox nightly? Seems like a duplicate of 148624 and should be fixed.