FVWM: Weird problem with current Firefox Nightlies and FVWM

[Chris Siebenmann]

I'm seeing a weird problem with trying to use current Firefox Nightly
builds under my FVWM configuration, where some of Firefox's menus won't
appear (or won't appear consistently). This seems specific to using
Firefox under FVWM; under another window manager (Cinnamon) things work.
Old Firefox Nightly builds worked fine, so something has changed in what
Firefox is doing (which means the issue might be in Firefox or in FVWM).

I thought I had a consistent and simple reproduction but it turns out
that I don't (it's consistent but not entirely simple). Is there any
debugging stuff that I should try in FVWM to narrow down what's going
on? Are people interested in a somewhat complex reproduction?

- cks

[Dan.Espen]

Post by Chris Siebenmann
I'm seeing a weird problem with trying to use current Firefox Nightly
builds under my FVWM configuration, where some of Firefox's menus won't
appear (or won't appear consistently). This seems specific to using
Firefox under FVWM; under another window manager (Cinnamon) things work.
Old Firefox Nightly builds worked fine, so something has changed in what
Firefox is doing (which means the issue might be in Firefox or in FVWM).
I thought I had a consistent and simple reproduction but it turns out
that I don't (it's consistent but not entirely simple). Is there any
debugging stuff that I should try in FVWM to narrow down what's going
on? Are people interested in a somewhat complex reproduction?

Bugs in nightly builds aren't interesting (to me).
Report the problem to the Firefox people.

[Dominik Vogt]

Post by Chris Siebenmann
I'm seeing a weird problem with trying to use current Firefox Nightly
builds under my FVWM configuration, where some of Firefox's menus won't
appear (or won't appear consistently). This seems specific to using
Firefox under FVWM; under another window manager (Cinnamon) things work.
Old Firefox Nightly builds worked fine, so something has changed in what
Firefox is doing (which means the issue might be in Firefox or in FVWM).
I thought I had a consistent and simple reproduction but it turns out
that I don't (it's consistent but not entirely simple). Is there any
debugging stuff that I should try in FVWM to narrow down what's going
on? Are people interested in a somewhat complex reproduction?

If you issue the command

bugopts explainwindowplacement on

Fvwm will give a lot of information about the initial placement of
new windows. This might or might not be helpful.

Ciao

Dominik ^_^ ^_^

[Chris Siebenmann]

| I'm seeing a weird problem with trying to use current Firefox Nightly
| builds under my FVWM configuration, where some of Firefox's menus won't
| appear (or won't appear consistently). This seems specific to using
| Firefox under FVWM; under another window manager (Cinnamon) things work.
| Old Firefox Nightly builds worked fine, so something has changed in what
| Firefox is doing (which means the issue might be in Firefox or in FVWM).

For the record: this turned out to be nothing related to FVWM at all
but instead that Firefox Nightlies started breaking if your X server
lacks compositor support. The non-FVWM environment I cross tested on
coincidentally had compositor support, so I incorrectly attributed this
to a window manager difference.

My apologies.

(The Firefox people are likely or definitely going to revert this change,
since it turns out that plenty of people on Linux are using Firefox on
X servers without the compositor stuff that Firefox wanted. See Firefox
bugs 994562 and 1001234 for gory details.)

- cks