88485 - Chrome displays anomalous artifacts under some circumstances

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: Skinability, defect)

Description

[Greg K.]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010629
BuildID:    2001062823

Sometimes after a crash, Mozilla will on subsequent startup display the Modern
theme with visual anomalies, including white lines in the toolbars and
scrollbars, garbage pixels under the location field, and status text in too
small a size on the status bar. (Screenshot attached.)

Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Mozilla, launch it, create a new profile, and switch to the Modern theme
2. Use Mozilla until a crash occurs
3. Relaunch Mozilla

Actual Results:  Mozilla's Modern theme is displayed with the aforementioned
anomalies.

Expected Results:  No anomalies should be displayed.

This happened within the hour of installing and running Moz 0.9.2 using a
brand-new profile. My Mac crashed for some reason and upon restart Mozilla
displayed the anomalies under the Modern theme. Switching back to Classic
eliminatse the anomalies, but subsequently switching back to Modern reintroduces
them. This occurred under 0.9.1, also.

The crash in question was reported via TalkBack under Incident ID TB32349284K.

Additionally, creating a new profile allows the Modern theme to display with no
problems. Subsequently switching back to the old profile reintroduces the problem.

Upon request, I can supply any needed files from the profile in question.

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

Attachment: Screenshot of post-crash Modern theme anomalies with notations

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

Attachment: Reference screenshot of proper Modern display

Comment 3

[Greg K.]

I have added a second attachment showing normal, proper Modern display. On
further comparison, notice that all XUL text is now smaller, including location
field, "Search" button text, personal toolbar text, and status bar text.

Comment 4

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

does a new profile fix this problem, or are all profile corrupted?

Comment 5

[Greg K.]

As stated in the original report, a new profile doesn't display the anomalies. Even after 
creating a new profile, though, the "bad" profile still displays them.

Comment 6

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

cc'ing other mac guys. have any of your seen this behavior at all? I never have,
and I crash all the time.

reporter, can you try clearing your cache and see if that helps? Perhaps it is
corrupted. Either use the UI in prefs, or throw away the "NewCache" folder in
your profile.

Comment 7

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Is this a X-only bug, or Mac OS 9 and OS X?

Comment 8

[Greg K.]

Mike, I duplicated the hosed profile folder, and then trashed the NewCache folder. After 
starting up Mozilla under that profile, Modern display was nominal.

I then replaced the hosed profile folder with the duplicate I'd made to see if the anomalies 
would return. They, strangely, did not. I'm at a loss to explain this.

Rest assured this isn't a one-time occurance, or I would never have filed a bug on it.

Comment 9

[Greg K.]

Simon, it's both 9 and X. Under 9, I only see this problem very rarely, and always after a 
crash of some kind (though not after all crashes).

Under X (running a Fizzilla build), if I create a new profile, switch to Modern and restart, 
the anomalies are almost always displayed then. It happened to me just today running 
the new 7/2/01 MOZILLA_0_9_2_BRANCH build up on "http://mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/".

Comment 10

[Greg K.]

I have witnessed this bug occur under OS 9 once again, and this time a crash was
not involved. I usually run 0.9.2, but ran the 20010713 nightly to test
something else. I used the same profile I usually use under 0.9.2. When I
resumed using 0.9.2, the same sort of display anomaliesin Modern were evident.

I repeated the suggested cure of deleting the NewCache directory. This time it
did not fix the problem. At this time, the anomalies are still being displayed.
          c

Comment 11

[Greg K.]

For what it's worth, this time I also see the anomalies in the content area on a
page that usually display fine in Mozilla. I will attach a screenshot.

Comment 12

[Greg K.]

Attachment: Example screenshot of anomalies occurring in the browser's content area.

Comment 13

[John Morrison]

Confirming, just because I believe it's happening to greg, but I have never
seen anything like that. (Er, well, I guess I have seen something like it:
months ago, before the preferred memory size was boosted, on Mac, I would 
occasionally get into a state where weird stuff would happen with drawing.
No 'white lines' like this, just random bits of UI drawn where they didn't 
belong). 

Comment 14

[Greg K.]

Update: this evening I created another profile in Mozilla. After using it for a
short time, I switched back to the affected profile and observed that the
anomalies were no longer evident.

This is in contradiction to my previous attempt at this remedy, and reported to
this bug on 2001-07-02 at 14:16.

Comment 15

[Greg K.]

Update: this bug seems less prone to happen when more than one user profile exists.

Comment 16

[Greg K.]

Update: having run with more than one existing profile for some time, I just
deleted all but one. On Mozilla's next startup, the anomalies showed up in force.

I'm running 0.9.3 (2001080214) at this point.

Comment 17

[Greg K.]

Additional testing revealed the display anomalies also appear under Netscape's
new Toy Factory theme for Netscape 6.1 (but in use under Mozilla 0.9.3).
Anomalies still do not appear when the Classic theme is in use.

I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the new Modern is a PNG-based theme. If
Toy Factory is, also, then perhaps that has some part in causing this problem,
though that wouldn't necessarily explain the anomalies in font and flat-color
area display.

Comment 18

[Greg K.]

Attachment: Screenshot showing anomalies evident under Toy Factory theme on Mozilla 0.9.3

Comment 19

[Greg K.]

...and, once again, merely creating another user profile caused the anomalies to
disappear.

Comment 20

[Greg K.]

If nobody at Mozilla can reproduce, keep in mind I live less than a mile from
the Nescape buildings in Mtn. View, and an engineer is welcome to stop by to see
this.

Comment 21

[Peter Trudelle]

->hangas, since this appears in some themes but not others.

Comment 22

[Greg K.]

Update: this occurred in on my sister's computer using Netscape 6.1. I often
maintain her Mac, and so something I have done to both her computer and mine may
be the cause of this.

I immediately think of INITs/CDEVs and Fonts. Will research.

Comment 23

[hangas]

I have seen this before.  IMO this is not a problem in the themes but rather in 
code that draws these themes.  Sending to hewitt to help find a better owner.

Comment 24

[Greg K.]

I have been able to compile instructions to reliably reproduce one part of this
bug using Mac/2001091311 (0.9.4); namely, the change in font size of text on the
Personal Toolbar due to the number of profiles in existence.

1. Install Mozilla. No user profiles should exist
2. Double-click the Mozilla application, creating the default profile
3. Switch to the Modern theme
4. Quit and relaunch Mozilla
5. Change the Font Display Resolution to 104 DPI by specifying a test line
length of 3.6 cm
6. Quit Mozilla
7. Launch the Mozilla Profile Manager
8. Create a new profile named "foo"
9. Select the default profile and start
10. Observe that the text on the Personal Toolbar is 10-pt Geneva
11. Quit Mozilla
12. Launch the Mozilla Profile Manager
13. Select and delete the profile named "foo" (be sure to delete files)
14. Select the default profile and launch
15. Quit Mozilla
16. Double-click the Mozilla application
17. Observe that the text on the Personal Toolbar is now 9-pt Geneva

Let me know if anyone else can reproduce this.

Comment 25

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

Mass reassigning my theme bugs to Shuehan.

Comment 26

[shliang]

seems like a chrome registry problem

Comment 27

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

mreh heh heh. Merry Christmas, Dave. 

Comment 28

[Greg K.]

Revising summary to remove reference to this being a post-crash problem, because
I no longer believe it is.

Comment 29

[Greg K.]

This problem is still evident in FizzillaCFM/2001122106 (0.9.7). Reducing the
number of active user profiles to one causes text in the chrome to display one
size smaller than normal. Deleting chrome RDF, localstore RDF and cache files
has no effect.

Comment 30

[Greg K.]

Simplified steps to reproduce:

1. Launch FizzillaCFM 0.9.7 into the Profile Manager0
2. Delete all existing profiles
3. Create a new profile
4. Change display resolution to 102 DPI
5. Change Theme to Modern
6. Quit FizzillaCFM
7. Restart FizzillaCFM
8. Observer chrome text size is now approximately one point smaller, resulting
in awkwardly small text.

Am I right in assuming that the display resolution setting should have no effect
on the chrome text size?

Comment 31

[Greg K.]

As I haven't experienced the severe chrome display anomalies I originally filed
this bug about in several milestones, I am resolving this bug for now.

I have filed bug 119824 specifically about the chrome text size problem.