18 ms·

Firefox tooltip bug fixed after 22 years

966 points by MallocVoidstar 3y ago

throwaway67743 3y ago
I've just been trying to think how long the most annoying Firefox issue I see every day has been around, it's at least 10 years and it's very disruptive - copying just will, 70% of the time, not actually copy (mostly when copying URLs, as in right click, copy link context option, but happens on other occasions too even when using ^x) I can't be the only one suffering this, because no other application does it, although thunderbird has done on occasion but that is hardly the worst thing about it.. And then there is Firefox on Android, some genius decided to disable pull down refresh by default, not a bug I guess but more annoying than the plethora of problems.
hilbert42 3y ago
It would be good if Mozilla were to now fix other well-known bugs that have been in Firefox for decades. First, copying/pasting highlighted webpage text with Ctrl-C/V is unreliable (no text in paste) and copying via the context menu must be used if one wants it to work every time. Second, selecting text with mouse is awkward and irregular in many webpages. Moreover, whether one selects text from the right or the left makes a difference (it's often much harder to select one way than the other). Third, it is impossible to select only part of a URL in a webpage and only the full address is selected (and even then just selecting the address from other text is often difficult). One has to paste the full address into a text editor and select the wanted section of the URL from there. Why would one want to do this? Well, the URL may be a long address to a specific page on a website and before or after one visits that page one may want to visit its homepage so copying only the homepage section of the address makes sense. Mozilla, your text selection capability in Firefox is essentially not fit for purpose. Forth, entering dialogue into a box like I'm doing here on HN to post this text is always fraut with the risk of losing it before the text is posted. Accidentally refreshing the page often happens before posting and thus the text is lost irretrievably which is damn annoying if one has written a lot of text. Simply, there is no progressive save or UNDO in this situation. Why on earth not? Wordprocessors have had undo for decades so why not Firefox? (If I know the text is more than a sentence or two I edit with an external editor. Mozilla, this is unacceptable and you ought to be ashamed of the fact.) The fact that Firefox does not have undo or that text selection is broken amounts to primitive and unfinished engineering (especially so after decades of Firefox development), thus one has to speculate what other important code is also so rough and ready and unfinished that we cannot see! Mozilla, if any of you ever bother to read this then you ought to know how annoying these bugs are. (One has to wonder if you ever bother to use your own product—or perhaps you've never investigated how your users use your product.) One can understand bugs and limitations in a new product but they all ought to have been polished out after several decades of development. If you want to recapture browser market share then you could start by fixing these annoyances. Moreover, it would be a good PR exercise if you explained why these bugs have been ignored for so long. (Incidentally, there are other issues I've not mentioned here.) BTW, many of us have complained about these problems for years and we've never received an explanation as to why you've never address them (it's little wonder your market share has dropped).
golvin 3y ago
Firefox is just going to die from bureaucracy. I have another bug report on middle click drag scrolling that took them years to acknowledge and remain unresolved.
Kattykay 3y ago
[dead]
Nellyz 3y ago
[dead]
janandonly 3y ago
Hey Dang, isn’t this post breaking the guidelines? The post is not using the original title: > 148624 - (tooltip-ghost) Tooltips persist in foreground when Firefox is in background My point here is a meta point: it’s great that we can change the titles to something more descriptive.
CTOSian 3y ago
tooltips are annoying, there should be an option to be activated eg when a key - eg shift- is also pressed.
sundarurfriend 3y ago
Quite a curious bug that many people seem to have come across, some mention that they encounter it at least once a day, and yet I don't think I've seen this behaviour even once in the last decade and a half. It doesn't seem limited by OS either, so I wonder what the actual conditions for the bug to manifest itself were. (The only place I come across a similar bug is with LibreWolf (a customized privacy-enhanced Firefox). And I'm pretty sure that has to do with the fact that it's a flatpak, rather than to do with the browser itself, since no other Firefoxes I run have ever exhibited this behaviour.)
- Izkata 3y ago
  That would make sense to me - the only place I've seen this is with a snap app, I haven't seen it with firefox.
- UnlockedSecrets 3y ago
  I see this on a daily basis, Most times multiple times a day on a Linux KDE Plasma system with it installed natively on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Best i could describe it is that it happens when i happen to switch to another virtual desktop using keyboard shortcuts on the exact same frame that the tool tip pops up. My guess is it was some kind of race condition that required very precise timing that made it difficult to narrow down, Paired with heavy use of keyboard shortcuts meaning alot of people likely were not effected by it. Very glad to hear it has been fixed and looking forward to getting a version of Firefox with it! I just did some testing and getting it to happen is as simple as hovering over it, And swapping to another virtual desktop before the popup shows up with firefox not being the new active application.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    I am in the same boat as the OP. I don't even know where I should click to see a tooltip to begin with!
    - bmicraft 3y ago
      Hover over "X hours ago" of your comment for example
Semaphor 3y ago
Oh wow, I always just assumed it was somehow my fault. This has been following me for years, over different Windows versions and reinstalls. It didn’t happen often, but still regularly enough that I remember it.
- leononame 3y ago
  Same! I thought it was just me, happened on all of my machines, Linux and Windows
- crote 3y ago
  Yes! I thought I was going crazy, or was just somehow running a broken installation!
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Imagine how much money Mozilla could have made over the last 22 years if only they'd sold ad space in the stuck tooltip! They should monetized their own bugs, before somebody else does.
- domh 3y ago
  Same on macOS for at least a few years.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  Every non-native UI toolkit seems to have ever-so-slightly buggy tooltip behavior.
  - Kuraj 3y ago
    Yeah this happens a lot when the DOM changes and the app loses the track of the tooltip so it can no longer dispose of it when you navigate away from the target.
hexage1814 3y ago
Finally!
- blackoil 3y ago
  This will be the Year of Firefox.
vxNsr 3y ago
Pretty sure I've had this happen in chrome too, on both mac and windows, just kinda assumed it was an OS thing.
- Groxx 3y ago
  Yeah, I've seen it in multiple programs, multiple OSes, etc. Never noticed Firefox was abnormally prone to it or anything. Still, a bugfix is always good to see.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Yeah, I've definitely seen this bug but I can't remember if it was Firefox (definitely possible) or another app either! But it can be super annoying so I'm glad to see it fixed here.
- ggm 3y ago
  Yep. Trivial to trigger this in chrome with gmail, hoverovers persist in a tooltip like box no matter how much scrolling you do. If you can make ANOTHER one pop up the first dies and if you want, you've now put the thing into its correct handler loop and the one you trigger dies too. Somehow missing when you use the screenshot tool too! so very hard to send google a bug report.
- kgeist 3y ago
  There was a similar Windows bug when a tooltip in the notification area (systray) wouldn't disappear no matter what. I first found the bug in Windows XP, and then witnessed it in Vista, in Windows 7, Windows 10. It was my ritual to check if it's fixed yet when upgrading to a new version of Windows. It never was. Since then I moved to Linux and now I don't know if it's fixed or not.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    Don't make Raymond come over there... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42583 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42...
Jach 3y ago
At last. More of this please, Mozilla... One of the most annoying versions of this bug is when launching a full screen game, the mouse gets re-positioned and triggers a tooltip, which is on top of the game, and the game doesn't like alt-tabbing when you unfocus it to go deal with Firefox, so you just have to restart it...
- tuatoru 3y ago
  Huh. At this very moment I am listening to Jonathan Blow's talk to DevGAMM four years ago, which has this kind of glitch as a recurring motif. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&t=2729s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&t=2729s
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    It's a common motif in desktop videogaming. The modern desktop computing model is a multitask windowed architecture where the mouse controls the cursor on the screen, a focused window receives events, and the keyboard generates events that may or may not translate to filling text buffers or activating behaviors based upon the subtle state of the concept of "focus." A videogame generally wants none of that: no windows controlled by the OS, no OS-provided cursor because it won't fit the game's visual theming (or makes no sense in that kind of game at all), other behaviors on the mouse, different keyboard behavior, and (if they could get away with it) no multitasking; you need all that CPU for game stuff. So shifting a desktop PC from "not playing a game" mode to "playing a game" mode is, historically, an extremely modal shift involving kicking most of the OS to the curb, rejecting its reality and replacing it with your own. Modern OSes have better abstractions for this, and modern computers can actually tolerate running background tasks alongside high-performance games (we've crossed a threshold where most reasonably-optimized games can't find anything to do with all your CPU because the experience is still long-polled by human perception speed). But the fundamental design tension is forever there.
- rjzzleep 3y ago
  I'm still waiting for to fix basic container tab behaviour [1]. I can't help but think that their product management is completely broken. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858
jey 3y ago
Direct link to patch: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1
- jh00ker 3y ago
  Wow, if you exclude lines changed in the commit due to indenting changing, there are only five new lines of code for this change!
  - langsoul-com 3y ago
    Most of the challenges of a bug isn't the fix, but rather figuring out the behaviour. Especially true if breakpoints don't work :)
    - sroussey 3y ago
      Always a bummer when your tools for debugging don’t work. :/
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - acqq 3y ago
    The changes, in sum, in nsXULTooltipListener.cpp - if (tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc() && - nsContentUtils::IsChromeDoc(tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc())) { + // Make sure the document still has focus. + auto* doc = tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc(); + if (!doc || !nsContentUtils::IsChromeDoc(doc) || + !doc->HasFocus(IgnoreErrors())) { + return NS_OK; + } ... - } } return NS_OK; If I see correctly, all the changes are: 1) remembering result of tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc() and adding the test of doc->HasFocus(IgnoreErrors()). Note that writing this one now is maybe easier than it was at the time the initial code was written, it could be the "auto" in this current semantic didn't exist in C++ (or the used compilers/platforms) at that time. 2) Explicit return. Instead of: if (b) X; return OK; now it's: if (!b) return OK; X; return OK; which in this case increases readability as X is in many lines and b is a more complex condition.
fbdab103 3y ago
I am more shocked this behavior did not inadvertently change sometime in the intervening years. That is some impressive bug backwards compatibility.
- terr-dav 3y ago
  bugwards compatibility - sounds like a Microsoft thing.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Isn't "it's not a bug, it's a feature" an MS mantra?
    - itsTyrion 3y ago
      Linus Torvalds would like a word with you. If something is changed in the kernel, even if it's technically a bugfix and something in userspace breaks, it's a kernel bug, period.
- voxadam 3y ago
  https://m.xkcd.com/1172/ https://m.xkcd.com/1172/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
europeanNyan 3y ago
Better Nate than lever!
donatj 3y ago
A couple years ago I was Googling myself and found to my surprise a bug I had opened for Mozilla on BeOS in roughly the year 2000 was still open. Searching their Bugzilla now, I find no references to BeOS at all, were their issues pruned at some point?
- cpeterso 3y ago
  Issues for unsupported platforms would be closed (RESOLVED WONTFIX) but they wouldn’t be deleted. Bugzilla’s default search songs only return open bugs. Here’s a search for all bugs with OS = “BeOS”. Maybe one of them is your bug? https://mzl.la/3twxg9n https://mzl.la/3twxg9n
kelnos 3y ago
Oh god, finally. A related bug, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1569439 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1569439 , was closed 9 months ago, and that made things slightly better (that one is about tooltips not disappearing when simply switching to another app), but I was incredibly disappointed to find that they'd still stay up when switching to another workspace. On the downside, this is sorta a "wrong" fix. Tooltips should show up even if the window doesn't have focus (at least on Linux with GTK apps, which Firefox attempts to emulate). They should fix the actual underlying issue of them not disappearing when the mouse pointer isn't actually over the window anymore, when workspaces change.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Oh that one was the one I hit the most, not TFA; I hadn't seen this in a while and now I know why.
Paul-Craft 3y ago
Meh, 22 years? That's not even close to the longest standing bug I know of that's been fixed. ;) Here's the story of a 33 year old bug in yacc that was fixed in 2008: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080708155228 https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080708155228
- thaliaarchi 3y ago
  The malloc design, that led to that yacc bug being discovered, seems to have another interesting property which I didn't see discussed there: By placing large allocations (those larger than half the page size) at the end of a page, I would think it also allows them to be resized in more cases. Smaller allocations can be then made in the gap, until it's filled. Then, if realloc is called on the large allocation and enough space remains for the difference, it can be shifted backward with memmove. Whereas, the large allocation is placed at the first available position and further allocations are made after it, it has no space to resize. Disclaimer: I haven't implemented a memory allocator, so my understanding may be off.
nubinetwork 3y ago
One recent bug I've seen with tooltips is on wayland... it causes the whole display window to flicker between the current renderer and what appears to be an old back buffer... hopefully it doesn't stick around for 22 years.
- throw2022110401 3y ago
  You are holding it wrong, in Wayland every frame is perfect.
- hulitu 3y ago
  That is normal behaviour (redraw the screen with every pixel moved). Welcome to the 21st century. /s
theanonymousone 3y ago
Oh. I have seen this behaviour in other programs, recently mostly in Cisco AnyConnect. I always thought this an OS glitch.
- yipbub 3y ago
  Yeah, I imagined the same, but can't recall or reproduce in anything else now. Possibly a Mandela Effect?
  - theanonymousone 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure the Cisco one is permanent and reproducible (on macOS) :D
- alana314 3y ago
  Finder does it to me all the time
  - kaichanvong 3y ago
    had a feeling Finder did magic too; however, on changing focus into the Shortcuts App, revealed Quick Actions that baffles
- unnah 3y ago
  I see it a lot with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Word, never with Firefox, even though I use all of them daily on my work laptop. It seems people have so different usage patterns that they see completely different bugs...
- ale42 3y ago
  Altium Designer used to have the exact same issue for a very long time but I think it's finally gone some time ago
- wakeupcall 3y ago
  It's pretty easy to see why this behavior can come from programs that's don't use any standard OS toolkits, but go for custom or cross-platform solutions: - show the tooltip - rely on move events on the main window to hide it the move events are usually received only when the window is visible (and focused depending on the os), unless you take extra measures to grab the pointer and/or listen on global events, which involves more trickery to work right. It's the classic scenario where a decent system toolkit has this figured out and solved for you, while doing the same by hand looks somewhat easy and normally works 95% of the time, but fails in odd ways and drives your power users crazy. Driving UIs heavily by keyboard and shortcut is the sure-way to hit that remaining 5% all the damn time nowdays...
sfink 3y ago
Ugh, that sucks. I've been relying on this bug to create persistent sticky notes on my screen. Why do browsers insist on breaking stuff? https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
kazinator 3y ago
What would it take for Firefox not to prompt you to save a password that fucking didn't work?
- toast0 3y ago
  A sane method for websites to indicate if a password worked or not. And for enough websites to use it that password saving heuristics could be disabled.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    When you submit a form with a password and the password is wrong, you're usually taken back to the same form with the same password. The browser is showing you a form that, if it were submitted, would update the same saved password. Yet the popup dialog asking you whether you want to save the previous obviously wrong value is still persisting.
- _ache_ 3y ago
  Why would you want that ? It's an incredible useful feature. Now you can't forget that this password didn't work.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    But you can store only one not-working password per username and website. Clearly it should support multiple passwords for the same username and website and have a flag "working" or "not working". Bugmenot has this all figured out years ago! (Also, your username triggers me in a wildcard sort of way.)
aidenn0 3y ago
I actually saw this happen even more in the Linux MS Teams client (which uses Electron or similar I think?), but I've encountered it with Firefox as well.
- epse 3y ago
  Yup it's electron, even sometimes prompts me to "use the app" while using the app... anyway that thing is getting deprecated anyway
somsak2 3y ago
Interesting, this bug was filed before even the first version of Firefox was ever released -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history. Impressed that they've kept the bug tracker history working for so long.
- aspenmayer 3y ago
  Did the bug tracker history carry over from Phoenix/Firebird maybe?
  - dtech 3y ago
    This looks to have been from when it still was Mozilla
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    This was a bug in the Gecko engine, which was used in Netscape 6 and the Mozilla Suite (Navigator and Communicator) before Firefox was created (in response to Mozilla Suite bloat). Gecko still uses the same Bugzilla bug tracker.
1970-01-01 3y ago
>I'm seeing this problem in 1.6 on Win98. Bug is fixed, please retest :)
- Narishma 3y ago
  I would if they backported the fix to a version that runs in Windows 98.
szundi 3y ago
Completely normal bugfixing behavior, nothing to see here.
mrloop 3y ago
Could this be the same tooltip issue I see everyday on Thunderbird? I must use Firefox differently but in Thunderbird I'm often left with a tooltip telling the date of the last message I was looking at after changing to a different app.
- fanzhuyifan 3y ago
  Yes. Should be fixed in thunderbird nightly (or daily, as they call it). Let me know if it works!
wodenokoto 3y ago
Lots of software have problems with persisting tooltips. I regularly have tooltips from VS Code getting "stuck" and can't be removed until I close the application.
m4rc3lv 3y ago
I have always had this bug but I always thought it was a bug in my window manager :-)
nicman23 3y ago
literally was annoyed yesterday by this. i remember it from the compiz 0.8.1-6 days
anymouse123456 3y ago
Holy shit. This bug literally drove me away from Firefox a couple years ago. Wild.
- chrisjc 3y ago
  It's definitely one of those things that can drive someone a little crazy. My solution was to activate/trigger another tooltip, that would make the frozen one disappear, and hope the new one would behave normally. Wasn't ready to give up Firefox, but can't say that the thought didn't cross my mind. Now that I think about it, still to this day I see similar issues in other apps where some kind of popup/overlay/tooltip persists across tabs/windows/applications.
hans_castorp 3y ago
I am seeing this problem with Thunderbird as well since upgrading to Thunderbird 115 - I hope they are a bit quicker than the Firefox devs.
- ale42 3y ago
  The codebase for that UI part might be the same... Actually TB 115 might be the reason that the bug has finally been fixed in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1843203#c9 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1843203#c9
  - hans_castorp 3y ago
    Ah, thanks. The tip at the end seems to fix this on TB 115.
noman-land 3y ago
Haha wow. I've been dealing with this bug for so long I hadn't even considered it could be fixed. Wild.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
> "Guessing XP Toolkit/Widgets" That comment aged so well.
- mauricioc 3y ago
  XP stands for "cross platform": https://www-archive.mozilla.org/xpfe/ https://www-archive.mozilla.org/xpfe/
nologic01 3y ago
I have always blamed my various linux desktop window managers for that bug, never realizing its always the same culprit :facepalm: On occasion (a smaller screen) it could be quite annoying as it might interfere with the display of a form or other critical element. Looking forward to the update and the next 22 years of firefox not just being bugfree but being the impactful application it once was.
- rgreekguy 3y ago
  I will keep on blaming the window managers, because I have certainly seen it outside Firefox. And Linux.
  - a1o 3y ago
    I see it on Winforms applications too.
    - currysausage 3y ago
      Excel showed me tooltips’ shadows on other desktops. Took me a few minutes to figure it out!
- johnny22 3y ago
  i had the bug in other gtk applications so i blamed gtk or gnome :( Apparently it can be fixed by the application
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  It also happened on Windows and continues to happen with some other applications across operating systems. There's no one specific component or GUI layer to blame.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  It happens elsewhere. I notice it a lot with DBeaver.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
solarkraft 3y ago
I like making fun of them for not fixing decades-old bugs (and there's still a considerable amount left) and didn't really have hope they'd ever care. What beautiful news if this indicates that some other old bugs will eventually be fixed as well!
- em-bee 3y ago
  you may now predict when old bugs are going to be fixed. any bug at least 20 years old is eligible. nearest prediction wins. if you want to play the long game you may also predict if younger bugs get fixed more than 20 years after reporting. (if the bug gets fixed earlier than 20 years then the prediction becomes void) place your bets! *terms and conditions apply. firefox developers are not eligible.
fsckboy 3y ago
this problem plagues me, I even saw it today, and I'm up-to-date on the latest Firefox for Fedora, I wonder if it's rolled out yet? Here's the thing, though, they probably didn't fix it for me: I use focus-follows-mouse, so probably in my case Firefox will think it has the focus (because it does briefly), but it's just a little scrap peaking out from under a stack of other windows.
- fanzhuyifan 3y ago
  Have you tried with firefox nightly? The change hasn't made it to the release version yet (https://whattrainisitnow.com/calendar/ https://whattrainisitnow.com/calendar/)
buro9 3y ago
Ah, something extremely similar affects SyncTrayzor on Windows too! https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor/issues/760 https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor/issues/760
geuis 3y ago
Software is gradually turning into a similar pattern of layering like sediment. With most modern "hardware level" applications, there are still layers of OS magic happening under the hood. We're now into maybe decade 4-ish of software dependency. There was a scene in one of Alastair Reynold's books where a character basically was a computational archaeologist. That resonates with me a lot. In a couple centuries, it's not a terrible prediction of the future that software stacks will accumulate cruft over time and debugging certain issues will require immense financial effort to both dig through the layers of software commits and historical proposed merge commits, plus adding extra tests on top of bedrock code and its fixes. No idea what this will look like. I imagine easily executed functions will pop up in mixed pip's and npm's that are easily recreated functionality every decade, regardless of prior art. Every new programmer wants to make a stamp on the world. There's some saying about history repeating itself, but I'm dumb and don't remember.
- monsieurbanana 3y ago
  In 200 years if we're still there AI will be able to understand the full Firefox code base and fix any issues. Or at least it could do so, but may choose to force humans to fix those errors instead as payback for copilot.
  - vanderZwan 3y ago
    Do you understand all of your own cells?
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
      Interlinked
      - vanderZwan 3y ago
        I'm also pretty doubtful that anyone really understands their own emergent phenomena actually.
  - 3y ago
tedunangst 3y ago
Millions of eyes make all bugs shallow!
chrismorgan 3y ago
OK, that’s one major tooltip annoyance fixed. That was one that was very annoying for some usage patterns, but never really debilitating. But if we’re trying to fix ancient tooltip bugs, here’s one that is debilitating for some users: Tooltips are positioned relative to cursor position, below and to the right, but don’t take cursor size into account, and so if you have a comparatively large cursor, it occludes the tooltip. This has been filed in a couple of guises a few times, starting twenty years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248718 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248718, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296191 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296191, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557754 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557754, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712669 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712669. (I don’t really get why bug 248718 and bug 557754 were closed as duplicates of bug 1712669; I tend to feel that the oldest one should be the canonical one almost as a matter of principle, especially when it’s so much older.) This will affect many more users now than twenty years ago, because some time during Windows 10 they added a proper cursor size scale, so you can easily get a huge cursor (which I strongly suggest people try; I was amazed at how much it improved things, except for this class of bug). The old “extra large” cursor was equivalent to what’s now size 3 and the scale now goes up to 15, if I remember from a few years ago accurately. Size 4 is already enough to lose a couple of characters from the start of tooltips. (This is all about native tooltips, but naturally this is also a problem with DOM-based fake tooltips in web pages: they have no access to cursor dimension information, so no way to be certain of dodging the cursor. I recommend placing such tooltips above the cursor position, as that’s the most likely to be clear. Bug 1712669 comments 5 and 6 observe how this is a problem on Bugzilla itself—they put a DOM fake tooltip below on dates.)
denton-scratch 3y ago
Apparently it's fixed in FF119. I'm on 102esr under Linux, but I can't replicate. [Edit] OIC, it's a heisenbug. Funny though; I'm a longtime FF user, and I don't recall witnessing it.
piyush_soni 3y ago
Wow. Thinking about it, there are businesses built, peaked and destroyed in that time frame. :)
- adastra22 3y ago
  Mozilla being one of them.
dannyobrien 3y ago
If you're curious about how you'd even go about finding and fixing a bug in the Firefox codebase, Mike Conley has been livestreaming his dev work at Mozilla weekly for years. A lot of the stuff he records involves picking a bug from the backlog, and then meticulously hunting it down and murdering it. I really recommend giving it a watch, especially if you're just starting out in programming and want to see what work in a real codebase is like: https://youtube.com/@mikeconleytoronto https://youtube.com/@mikeconleytoronto
- jdwithit 3y ago
  When I was in college (so like... almost as long ago as this bug was filed, yikes!) I spent a lot of time volunteering for Mozilla. I started out doing bug triage for their QA team, which involved things like making sure it was in the proper Bugzilla component and had sane steps to reproduce and so on. Even this was very enlightening, as someone with absolutely zero real world experience. Seeing how a large scale project was run, watching how the "real" devs worked through fixes and features. Introducing concepts like diffs and patches and CI/CD (it was nightly builds in those days so not actually Continuous, but moving in the right direction). Later on I figured out how to build the apps, which was a bear, especially on Windows. Firefox, Thunderbird, and the whole Mozilla Suite which was still a thing back then, with integrated browser, mail, HTML editor etc. And finally contributed some bug fixes of my own. Nothing significant, we're talking like fixing typos and misaligned icons, but it still felt incredible to be shipping code that literal millions of people would use. All of this was immediately useful in my first job out of school. I started out doing IT support and QA at a startup but quickly found they had no build and deploy automation. Someone would push to SVN and you might not find out for days that it broke the build. I got them set up with a build server using what I had learned from Mozilla (Buildbot? Cruisecontrol? Hudson? Been too long) that would do a build on push and email the team if it couldn't compile or failed tests. Was pretty fun having a bunch of seasoned developers ask me "how the hell does our IT guy know about all this shit?" I was able to carve out a DevOps role for myself before that term existed, thanks to everything I learned playing with Mozilla in my free time. This is a roundabout way of saying I totally agree, hacking on Mozilla projects is a great way to get real world experience :)
frou_dh 3y ago
This is probably quite a common phenomenon in open source software. Namely, an unglamorous bug has been around forever and someone finally gets annoyed enough to roll up their sleeves and fix it themselves.
sedatk 3y ago
Now fix the kerning problem on canvas. That bug significantly reduces the readability of Google Docs et al.
layer8 3y ago
And this is why tickets shouldn’t be closed just because they are old.
thinkingemote 3y ago
https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL8ae372dc88d1d1b1b5fd4783aec003da378c3e45 https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL8ae3... If you see the five line fix for the bug and think "I could have done this!" You could! The actual answer is "why didn't't I?" So to answer that question for myself : How easy is it to compile Firefox and run the test suite? The long bug hunting bit after that is the fun part.
- scott_w 3y ago
  I think that's understating the fix: there's a number of lines removed that, to be honest, I'd not feel confident hitting the delete key on until I had a deep understanding of what they were supposed to be doing.
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    The “deleted” lines were just changed indentation, plus a slight refactor to exit early on certain inverted conditions instead of checking conditions to enter the big if statement.
- nikeee 3y ago
  I regularly contribute to the software I use and I tried doing something for Firefox. It was so hard for an outsider that I just stopped trying it. The entire system involving hg, various repositories, outdated wikis, very complex building, bugzilla etc is just so... hard to get into. If Firefox was on GitHub (or even a self-hosted GitLab) where I can just fork it, play around and have the exact same CI, that would be an entire different story. I whish it was as easy as that.
  - ylyn 3y ago
    Firefox has way too many components to be "just one repo you can fork".
    - cpeterso 3y ago
globular-toast 3y ago
I can't recall encountering this bug in all my years of using Firefox. I can't seem to reproduce it while using i3 window manager.
jraph 3y ago
Oh. I'm affected, seeing it several times a day, but I never managed to reproduce 100%. Didn't bother me too much but I guess I could happily do without. It also affects Thunderbird. I had no idea it was a well known, 22 year old bug.
thiht 3y ago
I absolutely love that the bug report was not closed as « inactive » or « stale » after like 6 months.
- flas9sd 3y ago
  my impression of the mozilla firefox bugtracker too - you might be taken aback by the lifetime of some long standing bugs, but what is confirmed, stays open. You'll collect low effort comments, but at least it avoids duplicates and the discussion is preserved in-thread. That impression lead me to meaningfully contribute in the bugtracker.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  I'm so relieved that stale-bot didn't become as common as I feared it would. I hardly ever see it these days, and good riddance!
krylon 3y ago
Better late than never, I guess.
darnfish 3y ago
This bug is older than me
- lom888 3y ago
  This bug is older than the initial release of Firefox by two years.
roshansingh 3y ago
This bug really annoyed me on Firefox and Thunderbird. Over the last two years I have learned to live with it.
pluc 3y ago
Imagine paying your CEO 3 millions but fixing a bug like this only after 20+ years
HeavyStorm 3y ago
Visual Studio has the same problem for at least a decade.
tehbeard 3y ago
I'd always thought this was just from my Win 10 install being "crufty" (a few years old, with some hardware swapped along the way). Never ran into it on my Linux box so I thought it was just Windows weirdness.
toddmorey 3y ago
That bug was a college kid!
millzlane 3y ago
I love Mozilla and I too have experienced this bug. I'm glad this has been fixed even it didn't annoy me that much. But it solidifies my choice in browser. Brb while I test Sonoma to see if I can create two separate egg timers with Siri...
wejick 3y ago
It's actually pretty impressive that the bug tracking system is keeping data from 22 years back and maybe more.
caboteria 3y ago
I can't help but contrast this to the Kubernetes project where stalebots close issues after 90 days of inactivity.
Ikatza 3y ago
Now if they could only fix how horribly Hacker News is displayed on mobile...
TheSoftwareGuy 3y ago
Does anyone have a link to the commit that fixed the bug? I'm curious how simple it was to fix Edit: nvm, I found the link in the linked page: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1
- werdnapk 3y ago
  Most of the commit is changing indentation for the outer `if`... the core of the fix is `!doc->HasFocus(IgnoreErrors())` Bug squashed!
ilyt 3y ago
Now they can maybe fix bug where favicons randomly show negative image on linux...
thefox 3y ago
It's not 22 years but 21 years ago.
user3939382 3y ago
Funny some guy on HN was just arguing with me the other day that the oldest Firefox bug was 11 years old and that they fixed over 1,000 bugs in their last release. I tried to search their bug tracker to see if this was true but the web server doing the searches was unresponsive.
PTOB 3y ago
Wow, this brings back memories. Years ago, the persistence of this particular bug led me to believe that Firefox was "buggy" and "messy". It broke any perception in my mind that Firefox is an elegant tool. It hit whatever that cognitive bias is [cit needed] that tells us "if it can't get simple things right, what else is it getting wrong?" or perhaps "beauty good / ugly bad". I'm older now and have Experience(TM). I know that: a) many expensive commercial tools are far less elegant and just plain broken (looking at you Autodesk AutoCAD and Revit since 2010s) b) my own idiocy/ignorance has larger-than-expected extents I wonder if I'm just jaded. Is it correct to believe that Firefox is "good" software? Is it what it is designed to be?
xp84 3y ago
So you're telling me there's still some hope for my favorite JIRA tickets[1]! 1. https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=statusCategory%20%3D%22To%20Do%22%20and%20project%3D%22Jira%20Cloud%22%20%20order%20by%20votes%20desc https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=statusCategory%20%3D%...
Sjonny 3y ago
Tooltips are the worst kind of information providers in a website. First of all you don't know they're there, you actively need to search with your mouse cursor and wait to see something lights up. And then you can only read it, no way to copy/paste information out of it. Often they also cover up other information when they do popup, and most of the time the extra information they do provide is useless. Tooltips should be removed entirely instead of fixing 22 year old bugs.
- chikitabanana 3y ago
  What's a good alternative?
  - Sjonny 3y ago
    There is no alternative. Either the information is required and useful and should be shown always, or it has no value and you can just leave it out.
warvariuc 3y ago
So, there is hope that in 10 years this bug in LibreOffice is fixed :( https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46429 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46429
fmx 3y ago
Here is another good one: too easy to hit CTRL+Q instead of CTRL+W https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 Only 20-and-a-half years to fix that one! In this case it wasn't because nobody got around to it, but because people could not agree on the fix, even though more or less everyone agreed that the old behavior was bad.
- Twirrim 3y ago
  There is a browser.warnOnQuitShortcut setting in about:config, that can have it pop up a nice warning and stop you accidentally ctrl+q'ing firefox. I don't know if they've gotten around to making that the default for new profiles. That bug thread is a irritating mess of conversations.
bornfreddy 3y ago
I'm hoping they fix that "you shall enter your credentials manager password or we will bug you for it on every. single. page with login form" (which on some webpages is literally every page). It forces one to be logged into password manager all the time, instead of authenticating just when needed. Still, I trust Mozilla more than some random xyzPass.
seancolsen 3y ago
Does this mean it will be fixed in Thunderbird too?
- jdwithit 3y ago
  Looks like the fix is in Mozilla's core UI widget code, nothing specific to Firefox. So yes, it should be fixed in TB too.
tortoise_in 3y ago
Atleast they are revisiting those bugs even. And then people say nividia on Linux is not going to improve. Hope

I've just been trying to think how long the most annoying Firefox issue I see every day has been around, it's at least 10 years and it's very disruptive - copying just will, 70% of the time, not actually copy (mostly when copying URLs, as in right click, copy link context option, but happens on other occasions too even when using ^x) I can't be the only one suffering this, because no other application does it, although thunderbird has done on occasion but that is hardly the worst thing about it.. And then there is Firefox on Android, some genius decided to disable pull down refresh by default, not a bug I guess but more annoying than the plethora of problems.

hilbert42 3y ago

It would be good if Mozilla were to now fix other well-known bugs that have been in Firefox for decades. First, copying/pasting highlighted webpage text with Ctrl-C/V is unreliable (no text in paste) and copying via the context menu must be used if one wants it to work every time. Second, selecting text with mouse is awkward and irregular in many webpages. Moreover, whether one selects text from the right or the left makes a difference (it's often much harder to select one way than the other). Third, it is impossible to select only part of a URL in a webpage and only the full address is selected (and even then just selecting the address from other text is often difficult). One has to paste the full address into a text editor and select the wanted section of the URL from there. Why would one want to do this? Well, the URL may be a long address to a specific page on a website and before or after one visits that page one may want to visit its homepage so copying only the homepage section of the address makes sense. Mozilla, your text selection capability in Firefox is essentially not fit for purpose. Forth, entering dialogue into a box like I'm doing here on HN to post this text is always fraut with the risk of losing it before the text is posted. Accidentally refreshing the page often happens before posting and thus the text is lost irretrievably which is damn annoying if one has written a lot of text. Simply, there is no progressive save or UNDO in this situation. Why on earth not? Wordprocessors have had undo for decades so why not Firefox? (If I know the text is more than a sentence or two I edit with an external editor. Mozilla, this is unacceptable and you ought to be ashamed of the fact.) The fact that Firefox does not have undo or that text selection is broken amounts to primitive and unfinished engineering (especially so after decades of Firefox development), thus one has to speculate what other important code is also so rough and ready and unfinished that we cannot see! Mozilla, if any of you ever bother to read this then you ought to know how annoying these bugs are. (One has to wonder if you ever bother to use your own product—or perhaps you've never investigated how your users use your product.) One can understand bugs and limitations in a new product but they all ought to have been polished out after several decades of development. If you want to recapture browser market share then you could start by fixing these annoyances. Moreover, it would be a good PR exercise if you explained why these bugs have been ignored for so long. (Incidentally, there are other issues I've not mentioned here.) BTW, many of us have complained about these problems for years and we've never received an explanation as to why you've never address them (it's little wonder your market share has dropped).

golvin 3y ago

Firefox is just going to die from bureaucracy. I have another bug report on middle click drag scrolling that took them years to acknowledge and remain unresolved.

Kattykay 3y ago

[dead]

Nellyz 3y ago

[dead]

janandonly 3y ago

Hey Dang, isn’t this post breaking the guidelines? The post is not using the original title: > 148624 - (tooltip-ghost) Tooltips persist in foreground when Firefox is in background My point here is a meta point: it’s great that we can change the titles to something more descriptive.

CTOSian 3y ago

tooltips are annoying, there should be an option to be activated eg when a key - eg shift- is also pressed.

sundarurfriend 3y ago

Quite a curious bug that many people seem to have come across, some mention that they encounter it at least once a day, and yet I don't think I've seen this behaviour even once in the last decade and a half. It doesn't seem limited by OS either, so I wonder what the actual conditions for the bug to manifest itself were. (The only place I come across a similar bug is with LibreWolf (a customized privacy-enhanced Firefox). And I'm pretty sure that has to do with the fact that it's a flatpak, rather than to do with the browser itself, since no other Firefoxes I run have ever exhibited this behaviour.)

Izkata 3y ago
That would make sense to me - the only place I've seen this is with a snap app, I haven't seen it with firefox.
UnlockedSecrets 3y ago
I see this on a daily basis, Most times multiple times a day on a Linux KDE Plasma system with it installed natively on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Best i could describe it is that it happens when i happen to switch to another virtual desktop using keyboard shortcuts on the exact same frame that the tool tip pops up. My guess is it was some kind of race condition that required very precise timing that made it difficult to narrow down, Paired with heavy use of keyboard shortcuts meaning alot of people likely were not effected by it. Very glad to hear it has been fixed and looking forward to getting a version of Firefox with it! I just did some testing and getting it to happen is as simple as hovering over it, And swapping to another virtual desktop before the popup shows up with firefox not being the new active application.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  I am in the same boat as the OP. I don't even know where I should click to see a tooltip to begin with!
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    Hover over "X hours ago" of your comment for example

Semaphor 3y ago

Oh wow, I always just assumed it was somehow my fault. This has been following me for years, over different Windows versions and reinstalls. It didn’t happen often, but still regularly enough that I remember it.

leononame 3y ago
Same! I thought it was just me, happened on all of my machines, Linux and Windows
crote 3y ago
Yes! I thought I was going crazy, or was just somehow running a broken installation!
DonHopkins 3y ago
Imagine how much money Mozilla could have made over the last 22 years if only they'd sold ad space in the stuck tooltip! They should monetized their own bugs, before somebody else does.
domh 3y ago
Same on macOS for at least a few years.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
Every non-native UI toolkit seems to have ever-so-slightly buggy tooltip behavior.
- Kuraj 3y ago
  Yeah this happens a lot when the DOM changes and the app loses the track of the tooltip so it can no longer dispose of it when you navigate away from the target.

hexage1814 3y ago

Finally!

blackoil 3y ago
This will be the Year of Firefox.

vxNsr 3y ago

Pretty sure I've had this happen in chrome too, on both mac and windows, just kinda assumed it was an OS thing.

Groxx 3y ago
Yeah, I've seen it in multiple programs, multiple OSes, etc. Never noticed Firefox was abnormally prone to it or anything. Still, a bugfix is always good to see.
stephen_g 3y ago
Yeah, I've definitely seen this bug but I can't remember if it was Firefox (definitely possible) or another app either! But it can be super annoying so I'm glad to see it fixed here.
ggm 3y ago
Yep. Trivial to trigger this in chrome with gmail, hoverovers persist in a tooltip like box no matter how much scrolling you do. If you can make ANOTHER one pop up the first dies and if you want, you've now put the thing into its correct handler loop and the one you trigger dies too. Somehow missing when you use the screenshot tool too! so very hard to send google a bug report.
kgeist 3y ago
There was a similar Windows bug when a tooltip in the notification area (systray) wouldn't disappear no matter what. I first found the bug in Windows XP, and then witnessed it in Vista, in Windows 7, Windows 10. It was my ritual to check if it's fixed yet when upgrading to a new version of Windows. It never was. Since then I moved to Linux and now I don't know if it's fixed or not.
- klyrs 3y ago
  Don't make Raymond come over there... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42583 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42...

Jach 3y ago

At last. More of this please, Mozilla... One of the most annoying versions of this bug is when launching a full screen game, the mouse gets re-positioned and triggers a tooltip, which is on top of the game, and the game doesn't like alt-tabbing when you unfocus it to go deal with Firefox, so you just have to restart it...

tuatoru 3y ago
Huh. At this very moment I am listening to Jonathan Blow's talk to DevGAMM four years ago, which has this kind of glitch as a recurring motif. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&t=2729s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&t=2729s
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  It's a common motif in desktop videogaming. The modern desktop computing model is a multitask windowed architecture where the mouse controls the cursor on the screen, a focused window receives events, and the keyboard generates events that may or may not translate to filling text buffers or activating behaviors based upon the subtle state of the concept of "focus." A videogame generally wants none of that: no windows controlled by the OS, no OS-provided cursor because it won't fit the game's visual theming (or makes no sense in that kind of game at all), other behaviors on the mouse, different keyboard behavior, and (if they could get away with it) no multitasking; you need all that CPU for game stuff. So shifting a desktop PC from "not playing a game" mode to "playing a game" mode is, historically, an extremely modal shift involving kicking most of the OS to the curb, rejecting its reality and replacing it with your own. Modern OSes have better abstractions for this, and modern computers can actually tolerate running background tasks alongside high-performance games (we've crossed a threshold where most reasonably-optimized games can't find anything to do with all your CPU because the experience is still long-polled by human perception speed). But the fundamental design tension is forever there.
rjzzleep 3y ago
I'm still waiting for to fix basic container tab behaviour [1]. I can't help but think that their product management is completely broken. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858

jey 3y ago

Direct link to patch: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1

jh00ker 3y ago
Wow, if you exclude lines changed in the commit due to indenting changing, there are only five new lines of code for this change!
- langsoul-com 3y ago
  Most of the challenges of a bug isn't the fix, but rather figuring out the behaviour. Especially true if breakpoints don't work :)
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Always a bummer when your tools for debugging don’t work. :/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- acqq 3y ago
  The changes, in sum, in nsXULTooltipListener.cpp - if (tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc() && - nsContentUtils::IsChromeDoc(tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc())) { + // Make sure the document still has focus. + auto* doc = tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc(); + if (!doc || !nsContentUtils::IsChromeDoc(doc) || + !doc->HasFocus(IgnoreErrors())) { + return NS_OK; + } ... - } } return NS_OK; If I see correctly, all the changes are: 1) remembering result of tooltipNode->GetComposedDoc() and adding the test of doc->HasFocus(IgnoreErrors()). Note that writing this one now is maybe easier than it was at the time the initial code was written, it could be the "auto" in this current semantic didn't exist in C++ (or the used compilers/platforms) at that time. 2) Explicit return. Instead of: if (b) X; return OK; now it's: if (!b) return OK; X; return OK; which in this case increases readability as X is in many lines and b is a more complex condition.

fbdab103 3y ago

I am more shocked this behavior did not inadvertently change sometime in the intervening years. That is some impressive bug backwards compatibility.

terr-dav 3y ago
bugwards compatibility - sounds like a Microsoft thing.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Isn't "it's not a bug, it's a feature" an MS mantra?
  - itsTyrion 3y ago
    Linus Torvalds would like a word with you. If something is changed in the kernel, even if it's technically a bugfix and something in userspace breaks, it's a kernel bug, period.
voxadam 3y ago
https://m.xkcd.com/1172/ https://m.xkcd.com/1172/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

europeanNyan 3y ago

Better Nate than lever!

donatj 3y ago

A couple years ago I was Googling myself and found to my surprise a bug I had opened for Mozilla on BeOS in roughly the year 2000 was still open. Searching their Bugzilla now, I find no references to BeOS at all, were their issues pruned at some point?

cpeterso 3y ago
Issues for unsupported platforms would be closed (RESOLVED WONTFIX) but they wouldn’t be deleted. Bugzilla’s default search songs only return open bugs. Here’s a search for all bugs with OS = “BeOS”. Maybe one of them is your bug? https://mzl.la/3twxg9n https://mzl.la/3twxg9n

kelnos 3y ago

Oh god, finally. A related bug, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1569439 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1569439 , was closed 9 months ago, and that made things slightly better (that one is about tooltips not disappearing when simply switching to another app), but I was incredibly disappointed to find that they'd still stay up when switching to another workspace. On the downside, this is sorta a "wrong" fix. Tooltips should show up even if the window doesn't have focus (at least on Linux with GTK apps, which Firefox attempts to emulate). They should fix the actual underlying issue of them not disappearing when the mouse pointer isn't actually over the window anymore, when workspaces change.

aidenn0 3y ago
Oh that one was the one I hit the most, not TFA; I hadn't seen this in a while and now I know why.

Paul-Craft 3y ago

Meh, 22 years? That's not even close to the longest standing bug I know of that's been fixed. ;) Here's the story of a 33 year old bug in yacc that was fixed in 2008: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080708155228 https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080708155228

thaliaarchi 3y ago
The malloc design, that led to that yacc bug being discovered, seems to have another interesting property which I didn't see discussed there: By placing large allocations (those larger than half the page size) at the end of a page, I would think it also allows them to be resized in more cases. Smaller allocations can be then made in the gap, until it's filled. Then, if realloc is called on the large allocation and enough space remains for the difference, it can be shifted backward with memmove. Whereas, the large allocation is placed at the first available position and further allocations are made after it, it has no space to resize. Disclaimer: I haven't implemented a memory allocator, so my understanding may be off.

nubinetwork 3y ago

One recent bug I've seen with tooltips is on wayland... it causes the whole display window to flicker between the current renderer and what appears to be an old back buffer... hopefully it doesn't stick around for 22 years.

throw2022110401 3y ago
You are holding it wrong, in Wayland every frame is perfect.
hulitu 3y ago
That is normal behaviour (redraw the screen with every pixel moved). Welcome to the 21st century. /s

theanonymousone 3y ago

Oh. I have seen this behaviour in other programs, recently mostly in Cisco AnyConnect. I always thought this an OS glitch.

yipbub 3y ago
Yeah, I imagined the same, but can't recall or reproduce in anything else now. Possibly a Mandela Effect?
- theanonymousone 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure the Cisco one is permanent and reproducible (on macOS) :D
alana314 3y ago
Finder does it to me all the time
- kaichanvong 3y ago
  had a feeling Finder did magic too; however, on changing focus into the Shortcuts App, revealed Quick Actions that baffles
unnah 3y ago
I see it a lot with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Word, never with Firefox, even though I use all of them daily on my work laptop. It seems people have so different usage patterns that they see completely different bugs...
ale42 3y ago
Altium Designer used to have the exact same issue for a very long time but I think it's finally gone some time ago
wakeupcall 3y ago
It's pretty easy to see why this behavior can come from programs that's don't use any standard OS toolkits, but go for custom or cross-platform solutions: - show the tooltip - rely on move events on the main window to hide it the move events are usually received only when the window is visible (and focused depending on the os), unless you take extra measures to grab the pointer and/or listen on global events, which involves more trickery to work right. It's the classic scenario where a decent system toolkit has this figured out and solved for you, while doing the same by hand looks somewhat easy and normally works 95% of the time, but fails in odd ways and drives your power users crazy. Driving UIs heavily by keyboard and shortcut is the sure-way to hit that remaining 5% all the damn time nowdays...

sfink 3y ago

Ugh, that sucks. I've been relying on this bug to create persistent sticky notes on my screen. Why do browsers insist on breaking stuff? https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

kazinator 3y ago

What would it take for Firefox not to prompt you to save a password that fucking didn't work?

toast0 3y ago
A sane method for websites to indicate if a password worked or not. And for enough websites to use it that password saving heuristics could be disabled.
- kazinator 3y ago
  When you submit a form with a password and the password is wrong, you're usually taken back to the same form with the same password. The browser is showing you a form that, if it were submitted, would update the same saved password. Yet the popup dialog asking you whether you want to save the previous obviously wrong value is still persisting.
_ache_ 3y ago
Why would you want that ? It's an incredible useful feature. Now you can't forget that this password didn't work.
- Aachen 3y ago
  But you can store only one not-working password per username and website. Clearly it should support multiple passwords for the same username and website and have a flag "working" or "not working". Bugmenot has this all figured out years ago! (Also, your username triggers me in a wildcard sort of way.)

aidenn0 3y ago

I actually saw this happen even more in the Linux MS Teams client (which uses Electron or similar I think?), but I've encountered it with Firefox as well.

epse 3y ago
Yup it's electron, even sometimes prompts me to "use the app" while using the app... anyway that thing is getting deprecated anyway

somsak2 3y ago

Interesting, this bug was filed before even the first version of Firefox was ever released -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history. Impressed that they've kept the bug tracker history working for so long.

aspenmayer 3y ago
Did the bug tracker history carry over from Phoenix/Firebird maybe?
- dtech 3y ago
  This looks to have been from when it still was Mozilla
- cpeterso 3y ago
  This was a bug in the Gecko engine, which was used in Netscape 6 and the Mozilla Suite (Navigator and Communicator) before Firefox was created (in response to Mozilla Suite bloat). Gecko still uses the same Bugzilla bug tracker.

1970-01-01 3y ago

>I'm seeing this problem in 1.6 on Win98. Bug is fixed, please retest :)

Narishma 3y ago
I would if they backported the fix to a version that runs in Windows 98.

szundi 3y ago

Completely normal bugfixing behavior, nothing to see here.

mrloop 3y ago

Could this be the same tooltip issue I see everyday on Thunderbird? I must use Firefox differently but in Thunderbird I'm often left with a tooltip telling the date of the last message I was looking at after changing to a different app.

fanzhuyifan 3y ago
Yes. Should be fixed in thunderbird nightly (or daily, as they call it). Let me know if it works!

wodenokoto 3y ago

Lots of software have problems with persisting tooltips. I regularly have tooltips from VS Code getting "stuck" and can't be removed until I close the application.

m4rc3lv 3y ago

I have always had this bug but I always thought it was a bug in my window manager :-)

nicman23 3y ago

literally was annoyed yesterday by this. i remember it from the compiz 0.8.1-6 days

anymouse123456 3y ago

Holy shit. This bug literally drove me away from Firefox a couple years ago. Wild.

chrisjc 3y ago
It's definitely one of those things that can drive someone a little crazy. My solution was to activate/trigger another tooltip, that would make the frozen one disappear, and hope the new one would behave normally. Wasn't ready to give up Firefox, but can't say that the thought didn't cross my mind. Now that I think about it, still to this day I see similar issues in other apps where some kind of popup/overlay/tooltip persists across tabs/windows/applications.

hans_castorp 3y ago

I am seeing this problem with Thunderbird as well since upgrading to Thunderbird 115 - I hope they are a bit quicker than the Firefox devs.

ale42 3y ago
The codebase for that UI part might be the same... Actually TB 115 might be the reason that the bug has finally been fixed in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1843203#c9 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1843203#c9
- hans_castorp 3y ago
  Ah, thanks. The tip at the end seems to fix this on TB 115.

noman-land 3y ago

Haha wow. I've been dealing with this bug for so long I hadn't even considered it could be fixed. Wild.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

> "Guessing XP Toolkit/Widgets" That comment aged so well.

mauricioc 3y ago
XP stands for "cross platform": https://www-archive.mozilla.org/xpfe/ https://www-archive.mozilla.org/xpfe/

nologic01 3y ago

I have always blamed my various linux desktop window managers for that bug, never realizing its always the same culprit :facepalm: On occasion (a smaller screen) it could be quite annoying as it might interfere with the display of a form or other critical element. Looking forward to the update and the next 22 years of firefox not just being bugfree but being the impactful application it once was.

rgreekguy 3y ago
I will keep on blaming the window managers, because I have certainly seen it outside Firefox. And Linux.
- a1o 3y ago
  I see it on Winforms applications too.
  - currysausage 3y ago
    Excel showed me tooltips’ shadows on other desktops. Took me a few minutes to figure it out!
johnny22 3y ago
i had the bug in other gtk applications so i blamed gtk or gnome :( Apparently it can be fixed by the application
TonyTrapp 3y ago
It also happened on Windows and continues to happen with some other applications across operating systems. There's no one specific component or GUI layer to blame.
CalRobert 3y ago
It happens elsewhere. I notice it a lot with DBeaver.
matkoniecz 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

solarkraft 3y ago

I like making fun of them for not fixing decades-old bugs (and there's still a considerable amount left) and didn't really have hope they'd ever care. What beautiful news if this indicates that some other old bugs will eventually be fixed as well!

em-bee 3y ago
you may now predict when old bugs are going to be fixed. any bug at least 20 years old is eligible. nearest prediction wins. if you want to play the long game you may also predict if younger bugs get fixed more than 20 years after reporting. (if the bug gets fixed earlier than 20 years then the prediction becomes void) place your bets! *terms and conditions apply. firefox developers are not eligible.

fsckboy 3y ago

this problem plagues me, I even saw it today, and I'm up-to-date on the latest Firefox for Fedora, I wonder if it's rolled out yet? Here's the thing, though, they probably didn't fix it for me: I use focus-follows-mouse, so probably in my case Firefox will think it has the focus (because it does briefly), but it's just a little scrap peaking out from under a stack of other windows.

fanzhuyifan 3y ago
Have you tried with firefox nightly? The change hasn't made it to the release version yet (https://whattrainisitnow.com/calendar/ https://whattrainisitnow.com/calendar/)

buro9 3y ago

Ah, something extremely similar affects SyncTrayzor on Windows too! https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor/issues/760 https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor/issues/760

geuis 3y ago

Software is gradually turning into a similar pattern of layering like sediment. With most modern "hardware level" applications, there are still layers of OS magic happening under the hood. We're now into maybe decade 4-ish of software dependency. There was a scene in one of Alastair Reynold's books where a character basically was a computational archaeologist. That resonates with me a lot. In a couple centuries, it's not a terrible prediction of the future that software stacks will accumulate cruft over time and debugging certain issues will require immense financial effort to both dig through the layers of software commits and historical proposed merge commits, plus adding extra tests on top of bedrock code and its fixes. No idea what this will look like. I imagine easily executed functions will pop up in mixed pip's and npm's that are easily recreated functionality every decade, regardless of prior art. Every new programmer wants to make a stamp on the world. There's some saying about history repeating itself, but I'm dumb and don't remember.

monsieurbanana 3y ago
In 200 years if we're still there AI will be able to understand the full Firefox code base and fix any issues. Or at least it could do so, but may choose to force humans to fix those errors instead as payback for copilot.
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  Do you understand all of your own cells?
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
    Interlinked
    - vanderZwan 3y ago
      I'm also pretty doubtful that anyone really understands their own emergent phenomena actually.
- 3y ago

tedunangst 3y ago

Millions of eyes make all bugs shallow!

chrismorgan 3y ago

OK, that’s one major tooltip annoyance fixed. That was one that was very annoying for some usage patterns, but never really debilitating. But if we’re trying to fix ancient tooltip bugs, here’s one that is debilitating for some users: Tooltips are positioned relative to cursor position, below and to the right, but don’t take cursor size into account, and so if you have a comparatively large cursor, it occludes the tooltip. This has been filed in a couple of guises a few times, starting twenty years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248718 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248718, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296191 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296191, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557754 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557754, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712669 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712669. (I don’t really get why bug 248718 and bug 557754 were closed as duplicates of bug 1712669; I tend to feel that the oldest one should be the canonical one almost as a matter of principle, especially when it’s so much older.) This will affect many more users now than twenty years ago, because some time during Windows 10 they added a proper cursor size scale, so you can easily get a huge cursor (which I strongly suggest people try; I was amazed at how much it improved things, except for this class of bug). The old “extra large” cursor was equivalent to what’s now size 3 and the scale now goes up to 15, if I remember from a few years ago accurately. Size 4 is already enough to lose a couple of characters from the start of tooltips. (This is all about native tooltips, but naturally this is also a problem with DOM-based fake tooltips in web pages: they have no access to cursor dimension information, so no way to be certain of dodging the cursor. I recommend placing such tooltips above the cursor position, as that’s the most likely to be clear. Bug 1712669 comments 5 and 6 observe how this is a problem on Bugzilla itself—they put a DOM fake tooltip below on dates.)

denton-scratch 3y ago

Apparently it's fixed in FF119. I'm on 102esr under Linux, but I can't replicate. [Edit] OIC, it's a heisenbug. Funny though; I'm a longtime FF user, and I don't recall witnessing it.

piyush_soni 3y ago

Wow. Thinking about it, there are businesses built, peaked and destroyed in that time frame. :)

adastra22 3y ago
Mozilla being one of them.

dannyobrien 3y ago

If you're curious about how you'd even go about finding and fixing a bug in the Firefox codebase, Mike Conley has been livestreaming his dev work at Mozilla weekly for years. A lot of the stuff he records involves picking a bug from the backlog, and then meticulously hunting it down and murdering it. I really recommend giving it a watch, especially if you're just starting out in programming and want to see what work in a real codebase is like: https://youtube.com/@mikeconleytoronto https://youtube.com/@mikeconleytoronto

jdwithit 3y ago
When I was in college (so like... almost as long ago as this bug was filed, yikes!) I spent a lot of time volunteering for Mozilla. I started out doing bug triage for their QA team, which involved things like making sure it was in the proper Bugzilla component and had sane steps to reproduce and so on. Even this was very enlightening, as someone with absolutely zero real world experience. Seeing how a large scale project was run, watching how the "real" devs worked through fixes and features. Introducing concepts like diffs and patches and CI/CD (it was nightly builds in those days so not actually Continuous, but moving in the right direction). Later on I figured out how to build the apps, which was a bear, especially on Windows. Firefox, Thunderbird, and the whole Mozilla Suite which was still a thing back then, with integrated browser, mail, HTML editor etc. And finally contributed some bug fixes of my own. Nothing significant, we're talking like fixing typos and misaligned icons, but it still felt incredible to be shipping code that literal millions of people would use. All of this was immediately useful in my first job out of school. I started out doing IT support and QA at a startup but quickly found they had no build and deploy automation. Someone would push to SVN and you might not find out for days that it broke the build. I got them set up with a build server using what I had learned from Mozilla (Buildbot? Cruisecontrol? Hudson? Been too long) that would do a build on push and email the team if it couldn't compile or failed tests. Was pretty fun having a bunch of seasoned developers ask me "how the hell does our IT guy know about all this shit?" I was able to carve out a DevOps role for myself before that term existed, thanks to everything I learned playing with Mozilla in my free time. This is a roundabout way of saying I totally agree, hacking on Mozilla projects is a great way to get real world experience :)

frou_dh 3y ago

This is probably quite a common phenomenon in open source software. Namely, an unglamorous bug has been around forever and someone finally gets annoyed enough to roll up their sleeves and fix it themselves.

sedatk 3y ago

Now fix the kerning problem on canvas. That bug significantly reduces the readability of Google Docs et al.

layer8 3y ago

And this is why tickets shouldn’t be closed just because they are old.

thinkingemote 3y ago

https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL8ae372dc88d1d1b1b5fd4783aec003da378c3e45 https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/rMOZILLACENTRAL8ae3... If you see the five line fix for the bug and think "I could have done this!" You could! The actual answer is "why didn't't I?" So to answer that question for myself : How easy is it to compile Firefox and run the test suite? The long bug hunting bit after that is the fun part.

scott_w 3y ago
I think that's understating the fix: there's a number of lines removed that, to be honest, I'd not feel confident hitting the delete key on until I had a deep understanding of what they were supposed to be doing.
- sgerenser 3y ago
  The “deleted” lines were just changed indentation, plus a slight refactor to exit early on certain inverted conditions instead of checking conditions to enter the big if statement.
nikeee 3y ago
I regularly contribute to the software I use and I tried doing something for Firefox. It was so hard for an outsider that I just stopped trying it. The entire system involving hg, various repositories, outdated wikis, very complex building, bugzilla etc is just so... hard to get into. If Firefox was on GitHub (or even a self-hosted GitLab) where I can just fork it, play around and have the exact same CI, that would be an entire different story. I whish it was as easy as that.
- ylyn 3y ago
  Firefox has way too many components to be "just one repo you can fork".
  - cpeterso 3y ago

globular-toast 3y ago

I can't recall encountering this bug in all my years of using Firefox. I can't seem to reproduce it while using i3 window manager.

jraph 3y ago

Oh. I'm affected, seeing it several times a day, but I never managed to reproduce 100%. Didn't bother me too much but I guess I could happily do without. It also affects Thunderbird. I had no idea it was a well known, 22 year old bug.

thiht 3y ago

I absolutely love that the bug report was not closed as « inactive » or « stale » after like 6 months.

flas9sd 3y ago
my impression of the mozilla firefox bugtracker too - you might be taken aback by the lifetime of some long standing bugs, but what is confirmed, stays open. You'll collect low effort comments, but at least it avoids duplicates and the discussion is preserved in-thread. That impression lead me to meaningfully contribute in the bugtracker.
sundarurfriend 3y ago
I'm so relieved that stale-bot didn't become as common as I feared it would. I hardly ever see it these days, and good riddance!

krylon 3y ago

Better late than never, I guess.

darnfish 3y ago

This bug is older than me

lom888 3y ago
This bug is older than the initial release of Firefox by two years.

roshansingh 3y ago

This bug really annoyed me on Firefox and Thunderbird. Over the last two years I have learned to live with it.

pluc 3y ago

Imagine paying your CEO 3 millions but fixing a bug like this only after 20+ years

HeavyStorm 3y ago

Visual Studio has the same problem for at least a decade.

tehbeard 3y ago

I'd always thought this was just from my Win 10 install being "crufty" (a few years old, with some hardware swapped along the way). Never ran into it on my Linux box so I thought it was just Windows weirdness.

toddmorey 3y ago

That bug was a college kid!

millzlane 3y ago

I love Mozilla and I too have experienced this bug. I'm glad this has been fixed even it didn't annoy me that much. But it solidifies my choice in browser. Brb while I test Sonoma to see if I can create two separate egg timers with Siri...

wejick 3y ago

It's actually pretty impressive that the bug tracking system is keeping data from 22 years back and maybe more.

caboteria 3y ago

I can't help but contrast this to the Kubernetes project where stalebots close issues after 90 days of inactivity.

Ikatza 3y ago

Now if they could only fix how horribly Hacker News is displayed on mobile...

TheSoftwareGuy 3y ago

Does anyone have a link to the commit that fixed the bug? I'm curious how simple it was to fix Edit: nvm, I found the link in the linked page: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8ae372dc88d1

werdnapk 3y ago
Most of the commit is changing indentation for the outer `if`... the core of the fix is `!doc->HasFocus(IgnoreErrors())` Bug squashed!

ilyt 3y ago

Now they can maybe fix bug where favicons randomly show negative image on linux...

thefox 3y ago

It's not 22 years but 21 years ago.

user3939382 3y ago

Funny some guy on HN was just arguing with me the other day that the oldest Firefox bug was 11 years old and that they fixed over 1,000 bugs in their last release. I tried to search their bug tracker to see if this was true but the web server doing the searches was unresponsive.

PTOB 3y ago

Wow, this brings back memories. Years ago, the persistence of this particular bug led me to believe that Firefox was "buggy" and "messy". It broke any perception in my mind that Firefox is an elegant tool. It hit whatever that cognitive bias is [cit needed] that tells us "if it can't get simple things right, what else is it getting wrong?" or perhaps "beauty good / ugly bad". I'm older now and have Experience(TM). I know that: a) many expensive commercial tools are far less elegant and just plain broken (looking at you Autodesk AutoCAD and Revit since 2010s) b) my own idiocy/ignorance has larger-than-expected extents I wonder if I'm just jaded. Is it correct to believe that Firefox is "good" software? Is it what it is designed to be?

xp84 3y ago

So you're telling me there's still some hope for my favorite JIRA tickets[1]! 1. https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=statusCategory%20%3D%22To%20Do%22%20and%20project%3D%22Jira%20Cloud%22%20%20order%20by%20votes%20desc https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=statusCategory%20%3D%...

Sjonny 3y ago

Tooltips are the worst kind of information providers in a website. First of all you don't know they're there, you actively need to search with your mouse cursor and wait to see something lights up. And then you can only read it, no way to copy/paste information out of it. Often they also cover up other information when they do popup, and most of the time the extra information they do provide is useless. Tooltips should be removed entirely instead of fixing 22 year old bugs.

chikitabanana 3y ago
What's a good alternative?
- Sjonny 3y ago
  There is no alternative. Either the information is required and useful and should be shown always, or it has no value and you can just leave it out.

warvariuc 3y ago

So, there is hope that in 10 years this bug in LibreOffice is fixed :( https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46429 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46429

fmx 3y ago

Here is another good one: too easy to hit CTRL+Q instead of CTRL+W https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 Only 20-and-a-half years to fix that one! In this case it wasn't because nobody got around to it, but because people could not agree on the fix, even though more or less everyone agreed that the old behavior was bad.

Twirrim 3y ago
There is a browser.warnOnQuitShortcut setting in about:config, that can have it pop up a nice warning and stop you accidentally ctrl+q'ing firefox. I don't know if they've gotten around to making that the default for new profiles. That bug thread is a irritating mess of conversations.

bornfreddy 3y ago

I'm hoping they fix that "you shall enter your credentials manager password or we will bug you for it on every. single. page with login form" (which on some webpages is literally every page). It forces one to be logged into password manager all the time, instead of authenticating just when needed. Still, I trust Mozilla more than some random xyzPass.

seancolsen 3y ago

Does this mean it will be fixed in Thunderbird too?

jdwithit 3y ago
Looks like the fix is in Mozilla's core UI widget code, nothing specific to Firefox. So yes, it should be fixed in TB too.

tortoise_in 3y ago

Atleast they are revisiting those bugs even. And then people say nividia on Linux is not going to improve. Hope