656517 - scrollbar missing in a xul:browser in a new window

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[John J Foerch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:6.0a1) Gecko/20110504 conkeror/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla XULRunner 2.0 - 20110304101727

Developing a web browser based on XULRunner, I found that with XULRunner 2.0 and later, the first xul:browser element in every newly opened window was missing a scrollbar, even though its content was long enough to require one.  In the application in question, the xul:browser was inside of a xul:stack, and the missing scrollbar would only manifest for the first one.  Subsequently added xul:browsers would have a scrollbar as expected.  Since this seems like it could be a very tricky problem to track down, I constructed a small test app that demonstrates the problem.  This is the scrollbar-test.tar.gz linked above.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run the XULRunner app contained in scrollbar-test.tar.gz with XULRunner 2.0 or higher.
2. A window comes up with a single button.  Click that button once.  It will open a new window that contains a single xul:browser, browsing to a page on the mozilla website.  (It may take a moment for the window to come up, since this test app simply uses the 'src' attribute of the xul:browser to load the url.)


Actual Results:  
With XULRunner 2.0 and higher, the xul:browser contains no scrollbar.  When run with a version of XULRunner prior to 2.0, there is a scrollbar.

Expected Results:  
I expected there to be a scrollbar.

Comment 1

[John J Foerch]

Attachment: test app that demonstrates the missing scrollbar

Comment 2

[Roel]

Attachment: Browser parent opened by openDialog v.s. openWindow

This example uses only 1 window: main.xul/main.js

When the parent window opens with window.openDialog, there are scrollbars available in Xulrunner 2.0 (same behavior as in 1.9)

When the parent window is opened with window_watcher.openWindow, there are NO scrollbars in the browser component in xulrunner 2.0
In XulRunner 1.9 there are scrollbars.

Verified on Xulrunner2.0 and xulrunner1.9.2.8 both on Win7(Windows NT6.1;WOW64)

Comment 3

[Roel]

Attachment: Browser(type=content or type=content-targetable) parent opened by openDialog v.s. openWindow works correct.

By setting the browser type attribute to type="content" and NOT type="content-primary" the scrollbars are always visible as expected.

The difference between "content" and "content-primary" can be found here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Tutorial/Content_Panels#Browsers
and
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL/Attribute/browser.type

I also tried "content-targetable" and this type also shows the scrollbars.

I'm not sure why 2.0 behaves like this, can anyone explain this behavior?

@John: I think this should be a valid "workaround" for your browser-scenario?

Comment 4

[Suki Venkat]

I was struggling with the same bug for a long time. My scrollbar would appear with the xulrunner application but would not appear in the Firefox addon, although I use the same xulrunner (firefox -app). Fixed the bug by changing "content-primary" to "content".
The code is at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/multiflow/develop
you can checkout using:
svn co https://multiflow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/multiflow multiflow
(see version 278)