Firefox/Thunderbird menus often change shortly after opening (should wait while processing updates)

Bug #705893 reported by Chris Coulson
18
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
DBus Menu
Confirmed
Medium
Unassigned
Global menubar extension
Triaged
Low
Unassigned
libdbusmenu (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

Currently, menus in Firefox and Thunderbird often change their contents shortly after the menu opens.

For example:
* Every menu briefly appears as a stub the first time it is opened in an application session. https://launchpadlibrarian.net/122180594/thunderbird-menus.ogv
* Thunderbird's "File" > "Send Unsent Messages" item is initially insensitive until Thunderbird checks whether there are any.

Currently, the menubar sends a signal over DBus when a user opens a menu, and this signal might trigger updates to the menu inside Firefox. Because the panel opens the menu immediately, these updates can arrive after the menu has already opened, which is visually jarring.

We need a way to postpone the menu opening until we've updated it, and then we should lock the menu structure whilst the menu popup is open to prevent any further updates causing flicker in the menu.

Changed in globalmenu-extension:
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → High
Revision history for this message
Ted Gould (ted) wrote :

This requires some playing with GTK in the menu rendering. Not quite sure how to do that. It's probably going to be tricky. But I agree it is a bug.

Changed in dbusmenu:
status: New → Confirmed
importance: Undecided → Medium
Revision history for this message
Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson) wrote :

This isn't really high priority anymore, since we avoid rebuilding the menu where possible now

Changed in globalmenu-extension:
importance: High → Low
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :
description: updated
summary: - Should delay menu opening whilst processing menu updates
+ Firefox/Thunderbird menus often change shortly after opening (should
+ wait while processing updates)
Ted Gould (ted)
Changed in libdbusmenu (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Medium
status: New → Confirmed
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