637139 - Drop down menus overlapping flash content have text rendered in greyscale AA, hardware acceleration off

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[orangezilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b13pre) Gecko/20110226 Firefox/4.0b13pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b13pre) Gecko/20110226 Firefox/4.0b13pre

When drop down menus overlap flash content with hardware acceleration off, the text is rendered in greyscale AA

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make sure hardware acceleration is unticked in options>advanced>general, if
not untick & restart.
2. Go to http://arena.gamespy.com/ mouse over games, the drop down menu is rendered with greyscale antialiasing as it overlaps flash content).
3. Go to http://espn.go.com/ mouse over any text on the black My ESPN bar, the drop down menu appears and all text on bar drops to greyscale AA.
4. Go to http://www.nvidia.com/page/home.html , make sure USA region is selected, the menu at the top (Download Drivers, Cool Stuff etc.) is rendered in greyscale AA even if you don't mouse over (unlike the ESPN case), the drop down menus are all rendered in greyscale AA.
5. Go to http://www.samsung.com/uk/ , the text on the whole page is rendered in greyscale AA including the drop down menus.
Actual Results:  
Text is rendered in greyscale AA when flash is either present or the menus overlap the flash content

Expected Results:  
Text should always be rendered in sub pixel AA

Disabling the plugin container (setting dom.ipc.plugins.enabled in about:config to false) fixes most of the problems, except:

(i) with point 4, Nvidia, where the Products drop down menu will seemingly randomly revert to grayscale AA, probably related to it being the only menu that overlaps the flash window

(ii) with point 5, Samsung, where all text is sub pixel AA apart from the 'My Samsung' bar at the bottom (this is correctly rendered with sub pixel AA with hardware acceleration on, in Opera 11, Iron/Chrome 9, IE9).

Comment 1

[orangezilla]

Attachment: Screenshot showing drop down menu overlapping flash with greyscale AA vs flash ad disabled sub pixel AA

On the left you see the drop down menu text is rendered with greyscale antialiasing as it overlaps flash content outlined in green, on the right the drop down menu is rendered in subpixel AA as the flash ad on the right is blocked.

Comment 2

[orangezilla]

Attachment: Comparison between NVidia drop down menu in Beta 7 pc on, 13pre plugin container off and on

On the left you can see the text is correctly sub pixel aliased in Beta 7 with plugin container enabled, in the middle with latest nightly buiol.d and plugin container disabled it is also correctly rendered, but with plugin container enabled it has greyscale antialiasing. 

This first broke for all the above sites between the 10th-11th November Beta
8Pre builds where it changed to darker AA, pushlog

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=df1d1ff6b489&tochange=0f17e5f1eb01

It later changed again to greyscale AA sometime between 31st Dec-10th
Jan but I think this is likely not the cause of the original problems
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=b083bc8b79ab&tochange=f9f48079910f

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Resolving old bugs which are likely not relevant any more, since NPAPI plugins are deprecated.