787220 - Location bar results dropdown often flashes and disappears/reappears quickly, creating a visually jarring effect.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 740043

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Cngevpxhaqrefpber]

When typing in the address bar, the results dropdown will often disappear and reappear quickly (I'm guessing because briefly there are no results to show, or none of the currently displayed results are relevant so everything is cleared in preparation for the new results to be shown immediately thereafter), creating a flash that's visually jarring. It would be awesome if this could be avoided... maybe by waiting a brief period of time before hiding the dropdown results, so that if the dropdown is displayed again shortly thereafter to show results again, there's no disappearing/reappearing flash.

Comment 1

[Cngevpxhaqrefpber]

I've also noticed that it happens even when one wouldn't expect it actually needs to happen. For example say I go to website bugzilla.mozilla.org a lot. If I type "mozilla" quickly, about halfway through typing it the dropdown disappears and reappears quickly, even though there's (seemingly) no reason for that to happen. This happens almost every time, and for other things I type too.

On the other hand if I type "mozilla" slowly, it doesn't disappear at all, as you would expect to always happen.

This happens to me in both 15 stable and 16 beta (my OS is 64-bit but I'm using the "regular" 32-bit Firefox version).

Here's a short screencast demonstrating the issue: http://www.screencast.com/t/kiSYZIrDCF

Comment 2

[Cngevpxhaqrefpber]

This is probably a duplicate of issue 740043 and issue 768980. As per comment #4 in issue 740043, I changed browser.urlbar.delay from the default of 50 to 0 and that solved the issue for me. Any reason why it's not 0 by default? Just wondering if there are any side-effects I should expect with that value.

Comment 3

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Does this happen if you start Firefox in Safe mode?

Did this start with F15? can you remember if F14 or F13 had the same problem?

Comment 4

[Cngevpxhaqrefpber]

Yes, if I change the browser.urlbar.delay value back to the default of 50, it happens in Safe Mode too. Setting that value back to 0 fixes the problem.

I don't recall if it started with F15 as I only recently started using Firefox as my main browser again.

Comment 5

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Thanks. I'll mark this as a duplicate of the older issue and keep all the data to one bug.