68112 - User Interface issues with Sawfish

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 29856

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[db]

The support for the unix sawfish window manager needs to be looked at. Sawfish
is probably going to be the main window manager in many distributions and is the
WM selected as default for gnome.

Sawfish as very aggressive and uses the windows properties a lot to give
different looks and behaviour to windows.

1. It has a windows history feature that remembers position and _size_ of
windows, so when one opens up a new window that has the same class as an other
they will open with the same size. For example, the add bookmarks dialog opens
up as the same size as the main mozilla window since the class is "mozilla-bin"
on both. Ant that dialog should not be that big.

The same thing happens with many dialogs, and even more annoying, when mozilla
pops up popup windows that many pages uses, then this popup is as big as the
main window.

Windows that have the same class but which is marked transient for anther window
does not have this problem but there size gets saved correctly even if they have
the same windows class.

2. Sawfish have a lot of stuff for transient windows, Minimize the main window
and the transients are also minimized. Minimized windows is always in front of
the parant window.

Since sawfish is going to be (or already are) one of the most used WM, it's
important that mozilla behaives good in respect to sawfish. I'm not an sawfish
expert, but I suggest that the people working on the unix interface start
talking to the sawfish mailinglist and John Harper to either change sawfish or
mozilla (or both) so that it works better then today. Because today it's not a
good situation.

In particular, the popup windows on many sites are very annoying since they open
up maximized since I have mozilla maximized. And these windows usually is very
small. Test for example: http://members.se.tripod.de/joma/page2.html

I'm sorry that I can't be more precise, and I know that there are several bugs
that has to do with sawfish. But I think there need to be a global change for
sawfish bugs and not only change one thing here and one thing there.

It's actually not just sawfish that is concerend but window managers that use
the WM spec a little more then old WM's and there is also a new WM spec out
since a couple of months that more managers are going to follow

http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/wm-spec/

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

This is basically covered by bug 29856 "*nix only : Window Class the same for
all mozilla windows".

Untill that is resolved, using window Class as a matcher for windows Mozilla
spawn, is a bad idea. There ought to be a release-note about this.

However, I use sawfish myself, and can't say i see it as a big problem. It is a
matter of applying settings that work well with an application. I can force
sawfish to hide every window that appears for that matter, but i don't HAVE to -
and i don't - since i wish to actually see the windows. I can probably tune
almost any VM to render my whole desktop totally useless if i wanted, but the
fact that it CAN be done doesn't mean i have to do it.

WM's being as tunable as they are is meant to be taken advantage of, so users
can tune settings to their personal likings. Note that Mozilla itself will
remember browser and mailnews window-size between sessions, so there should be
no need to tune this via the WM at all. Simply size it to the size you want,
close the app, and it will open that size next time. Browser popup windows
spawned at various sites will be then the size the html states.

As much as I like Sawfish, it is still in heavy development. Often with only
weeks between releases. To expect mozilla developers to keep updated on all 
changes is neither practical nor possible, really.

Again - when window-class bug is resolved, Mozilla's relationship with VM's in
general should improve a lot.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Um.  Mozilla properly sets the sizes on the HTML popup windows.  Sounds like
sawfish is then overriding the size of the already created window?   If so,
that's a bug in sawfish...

That being said, R.K.Aa's comments still apply. And there are several bugs on
various windows that should not be transient (eg the download progress dialog).

Comment 3

[tenthumbs]

I suspect this will be an ongoing issue until Mozilla gets enough prefs
to please 99.9% of users.

Some users, perhaps most, like windows opening with the last dimensions
used. Others, like me, want windows to always open in specified sizes at
specified locations. Window managers have all those options just so
users can control "recalcitrant" apps.

Comment 4

[R.K.Aa.]

One can specify window Position in sawfish, without specifying size.
Thus leaving the size to whatever Mozilla used last time, and leave the
placement to sawfish. The best of both worlds, and in effect what reporter seems
to wish for.

Comment 5

[Keyser Sose]

I am going to move this to UI Feedback/Design. This seems to me to be a generic debate rather then a bug with us (or at least a bug with Mozilla specifically). Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

Comment 6

[Peter Trudelle]

->danm for consideration.

Comment 7

[Dan M]

Seems to me that this is bug 29856, as R.K.Aa pointed out above. I'm in spring 
cleaning mode here, so I'm closing it as a duplicate.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 29856 ***

Comment 8

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

Chaning the qa contact on these bugs to me. MPT will be moving to the 
owner of this component shortly. I would like to thank him for all his hard 
work as he moves roles in mozilla.org...Yada, Yada, Yada...

Comment 9

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

looks like a dup to me