671277 - Can't select an item/option in dropdown menus when no window manager is running

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect)

Description

[nerio da canal]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build ID: 20110622105737

Steps to reproduce:

I have the necessity of using firefox 5 directly on Xorg without window manager (a kind of kiosk mode). 


Actual results:

All goes good but doesn't allow to select an option in dropdown menu. When I select a menu, it appear the dropdown menu but it disappear as soon as I move the mouse pointer down to select the correct entry. This happens with the firefox menu and with "select object" on the html pages. 
It worked fine with  firefox 2.* and 3.* 
This worked good with firefox 2.* and 3.*
I tried it with Linux Fedora 13, Fedora 14 and Fedora 15.

Comment 1

[Thomas Ahlblom]

Do you have a test case or an URL to a page that demonstrates the problem?

Comment 2

[nerio da canal]

My setup of the system is:

Fedora:
I create the user "test" and in his home I put the file .Xclients with
mode 755

$ cat /home/test/.Xclients
#!/bin/bash
firefox

Then in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ I create the script 00-kiosk-user.sh

$cat /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/00-kiosk-user.sh
#!/bin/sh

if [ "$USER" = "test" ] || [ "$USER" = "kiosk" ]; then
   exec -l $SHELL -c "$CK_XINIT_SESSION $SSH_AGENT $HOME/.Xclients"
fi

At this point when you login as user test firefox is started without
any window manager nor window decorator.
Browsing works fine, except that it is not possible to select options.
For instance try this link:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_select2
It's also not possible to select any item in the firefox menu

The same beahviour is present in Ubuntu (tested 9.10, 10.04). There
the kiosk configuration is:
put the file .xsessionrc (executable in the user home)

$ cat /home/test/.xsessionrc
#!/bin/bash
firefox

and login as user test.
Thank you

Comment 3

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

I can reproduce the problem.
I'm seeing a call to focus_out_event_cb() on the top-level widget
when moving the mouse outside the combobox button, which leads to
the dropdown menu being closed.  The problem also occurs for the
context menu, window menus and autocomplete menus - as soon as
you move the mouse the menu is closed.

Comment 5

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

How well did Firefox 3.* work with without a window manager?
Could you still type in the location bar if the pointer was below the bar and the dropdown opened under the pointer while typing?

Can you describe why it is important to not have a window manager?

Comment 6

[nerio da canal]

Firefox 3.* works fine with and without a window manager for our needs.

> Could you still type in the location bar if the pointer was below the
> bar and the dropdown opened under the pointer while typing?
No, without a window manager I can't. I have to re-focus the location bar 
with the mouse .

I work at Padua University in a classroom with 150 Linux Fedora
workstations and we need to configure it for hosting online exams.
To make the working environment as simple as possible and to limit the
actions the students can do the best solution was to use Firefox just
on top of Xorg, with a custom xul interface that I've built without
menubar neither location bar and with some personalized buttons.

It's 5 years we are using this solution and it fits exactly our needs
thanks to the great customization the Firefox browser offers.

Comment 7

[ianw21]

I also get this problem if I use a window manager but turn off the window decoration (as I'm using firefox in a kiosk enviroment it's necessary to have no title bar etc). evilwm fixed the problem until i set the border width to 0.

Comment 8

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

ianw21, can you confirm, please, whether you are talking about result 1 and/or 2 in bug 671532 comment 0?

Comment 9

[ianw21]

Running "evilwm -bw 0" and navigating to www.facebook.com and trying to select the Birthday dropdowns (month, day and year order):

- Firefox menus are working ok (result 2 from 671532)
- The html dropdown menus on the webpage are not (result 1). When I click on the month dropdown, the menu appears in the top left of the screen and goes away when I try to select anything from it. If I then click on the Day dropdown, the menu usually appears at the top left but only goes away whan I click anywhere but on the menu. Occassionally the Day dropdown briefly appears at the top left then moves to the correct location and I can select an item from it.

Note, this is when I am running firefox at full screen resolution (1024x768).

If I change the main window size by editing localstore.rdf then I get inconsistent html dropdown behaviour only for sizes 1024x767, 1023x768, 1024x767 and usually 1024x766. 

The menus work correctly with sizes 1022x766 and smaller.

Comment 10

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Thanks, ianw21.  That sounds like bug 665540, which at the moment is fixed only in Nightly builds.

Comment 11

[ianw21]

I've just tried the nightly builds of 8.0a1 and 7.0a2. They do fix the placement problem (though in 7.0a2, the menu initially appears at the top left but then moves to the correct location). 

However, I still cannot select anything from the dropdown menu with the mouse unless I have a window manager running.

Comment 12

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

(In reply to ianw21 from comment #11)
> However, I still cannot select anything from the dropdown menu with the
> mouse unless I have a window manager running.

OK.  That is this bug report, thanks.

Comment 13

[ianw21]

I've built various firefox versions now and found that this problem first appeared in firefox 4.0 b12. The fix for bug 545429 seems to be the cause (removing GrabKeyboard stuff from widget/src/gtk2/nsWindow.cpp). I reapplied the grabkeyboard stuff to later versions of firefox (along with the fix for bug 665540) and dropdowns now works correctly (and as we are in a locked down environment and block other windows like the file open dialog we have not encountered the things that the bugfix was intended to fix).

Comment 14

[Pawel Stolowski]

I can confirm the problem with Firefox 7.0.1 and Openbox window manager, when window decorations are disabled OR firefox fullscreen mode (F11) is activated.

Comment 15

[Mounir Lamouri (:mounir)]

(In reply to Pawel Stolowski from comment #14)
> I can confirm the problem with Firefox 7.0.1 and Openbox window manager,
> when window decorations are disabled OR firefox fullscreen mode (F11) is
> activated.

I'm using Firefox 7.0.1 with Openbox and I can't reproduce this in fullscreen mode. I didn't try disabling the decorations though.

Comment 16

[tony]

I also have this problem. I'm using Firefox 9.0.1 on OpenBSD 5.1 and, if I'm not using a window manager, I can't select anything from dropdown menu. For debug purpose the problem can be replicated using Xephyr:

$ Xephyr :1 -screen 1024x768 &
$ DISPLAY=:1.0 firefox -width 1024 -height 768

Expected behaviour: can select items from dropdown menu
Actual results: cannot select items from dropdown menu

Comment 17

[tony]

(In reply to tony from comment #16)
> I also have this problem. I'm using Firefox 9.0.1 on OpenBSD 5.1 and, if I'm
> not using a window manager, I can't select anything from dropdown menu. For
> debug purpose the problem can be replicated using Xephyr:
> 
> $ Xephyr :1 -screen 1024x768 &
> $ DISPLAY=:1.0 firefox -width 1024 -height 768
> 
> Expected behaviour: can select items from dropdown menu
> Actual results: cannot select items from dropdown menu

I tried a more recent version of Firefox and I confirm the problem with Firefox 15.0.1 on OpenBSD -current (i386).

Comment 18

[tony]

Same problem with Firefox 15.0.1 on Slackware Linux 14.0 (i386).

Anybody willing to test if this bug can be replicated on his machine? This bug has been listed as UNCONFIRMED for more than a year...

Comment 19

[nerio da canal]

(In reply to tony from comment #18)
> Same problem with Firefox 15.0.1 on Slackware Linux 14.0 (i386).
> 
> Anybody willing to test if this bug can be replicated on his machine? This
> bug has been listed as UNCONFIRMED for more than a year...

Same problem with Firefox 15.0.1 on Fedora 17

Comment 20

[sanicki]

Same problem experienced with Firefox 19.02 and Firefox 25.0 on Ubuntu 12.04 (i386).

Comment 21

[mu3en]

Reproduced with both Firefox and Chromium running directly via xinit in identical ArchLinux snapshots on ArchLinux host.
Running either via i3 instead solves the flicker/disappear menus.