[TAG] Mozilla hogging the screen

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 08:22:25AM +0100, Neil Youngman wrote:
> Mozilla has started hogging my screen. I can select other windows, but if 
> Mozilla is maximised it remains in front of them. There is presumably a 
> setting somewhere that is causing this behaviour, but the only setting I can 
> find I can't seem to change. FYI, this is in KDE.
> 
> If I right click the Mozilla title bar and select advanced->special window 
> settings->preferences, there is a checkbox either side of the "keep above" 
> setting. The checkbox on the right is checked and greyed out. With a little 
> fiddling I can get it unchecked, but if I click OK and then reopen the window 
> to check it, I find that it is selected again.
> 
> I don't know if that setting is the source of the problem, but the other 
> windows don't have it checked, so it's a good candidate.
> 
> Any ideas how to fix this one?

Hmm. Perhaps one or two - my Firefox started doing some ugly thing a
while back, so I whacked it over the head a couple of times, and will
happily relate what LART I used. :) Mind you, this is in the nature of
shotgunning rather than troubleshooting (I can hear the sounds of
retching from the other techies here, but, hey, it works - and I didn't
feel like pulling down a hundred meg or so of code and wanking through
it.)

1) Move your ~/.mozilla to, say, /tmp/DOTmoz.

2) Start Mozilla.

3) If $UGLY_BEHAVIOR is still present, uninstall the mozilla package
	(making sure to blow away, or at least _move_ away all the stuff
	in "/usr/lib" and "/etc") and reinstall from scratch. If it's
	still there, curse life and file a bug. :) Otherwise -

4) Make a copy of your new ~/.mozilla (as, say, /tmp/DOTmoz_default.)
	Start replacing the subdirectories in the one in $HOME, one
	at a time, from /tmp/DOTmoz until the problem reappears. Narrow
	it down to the specific file, then diff that file against the
	default one. The line causing the problem should be relatively
	obvious - since Mozilla uses more-or-less sensible, descriptive
	names for their config variables.

To (mis)quote the folks at the Mozilla Project, "it worked for me."


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *