Fire Fox and find.

[DCIFRTHS]

Has anyone encountered a situation where you view your windows in Top Desk, select Fire Fox and get the "find" function in Fire Fox everytime you type a character into an input field on a page?

This is very reproducible. So far, enabling and disabling options in Top Desk does not prevent this problem. Exiting Top Desk does immediately stop the problem. I am using version 1.0.4 of Fire Fox and 1.3.2 of Top Desk.

EDIT: I wanted to add that this is an awesome program. It's one of the features I really liked on the MAC, and wished I had....now I do

[aunomvo]

While I haven't had that specific issue, several other people have discovered that Firefox and TopDesk don't play well together. The problem appears to be in how Firefox responds to the PrintWindow() call that TopDesk uses to grab the tiled images. (See here)

[OtakuSupport]

Thanks aunomvo.

We're still not any closer to finding a workaround for this - it seems that certain Windows functions (e.g. PrintWindow()) are tripping up Firefox, but unfortunately we've got no other way to grab window images.

This issue isn't just a TopDesk issue either - we've been able to replicate the behaviour by writing a small test program that just calls PrintWindow() on the Firefox window. On some machines there's no problem, but on others we see this bug.

[Guest]

Have you had any progres with this? It's the one thing keeping me from purchasing TopDesk

[OtakuSupport]

Sorry our last post on this subject wasn't clear - unfortunately we can't fix this issue, because it's a bug in Firefox, not TopDesk.

Firefox starts exhibiting the buggy behaviour whenever the Windows XP PrintWindow() functionality is used, and we've confirmed this by writing a small test application. We'd also like to see the issue resolved, and if we could fix it we would, but unfortunately we can't.

[Angel]

If also seen this behaviour sometimes.

May I ask if you have filed a bug report to the Mozilla Firefox Bugzilla? Have you contacted them directly to inquire on this issue? TopDesk is starting to be more known and I bet that they might be happy to work with you to fix this problem.

Also, perhaps the you can in fact fix the problem by yourselves if you were able to fix the problem in Firefox. After all the code is available as it is Open Source. You would be making yourselves a favor, as you would be fixing a problem for your customers, and you would be making the Open Source community a favor by fixing a problem in their flagship application.

I understand that fixing a bug in someone else's app is VERY tough, but I doubt that many people know the kirks of this PrintWindow() function better than you guys do, so you might have shot at fixing this.

Just a thought...

[OtakuSupport]

We haven't reported the Firefox bug, since there are around 200 bugs in it already. One of those bugs may be the cause of the issue, but we're not sure.

The problem with us addressing this ourselves is resources - we've estimated it'd take anywhere between 2-4 weeks to find out if this is a new bug, get familiar enough with the Firefox code base to find out what's causing the problem, and then fix it. That's 2-4 weeks that one of us isn't working on TopDesk or any other projects we might have in the pipeline. While it'd be really nice to have the time to spend fixing this issue, it's just not possible for us at the moment.

Given that it's open source, however, there's nothing stopping one of our users from having a go at fixing it .

[Angel]

I understand. I also wish I had the time and the skills!
I guess it all depends on how much this does bother your users. For me is not a big deal so far, but perhaps other people feel differently.

However, I think that you should still file the bug. If it is a duplicate they will find out soon enough (as they know more about their current problems than you do). If it is not, they might get to fix it eventually.

Cheers,

Angel

[OtakuSupport]

Remember that even if we managed to fix the bug, there's a chance that it wouldn't make it into the official Firefox for up to 6 months, or it might never make it in.

We'll submit the bug report when we've got the time to compile it. We need to conclusively prove that it's PrintWindow, and document exactly how to reproduce it if there's to be any chance of it getting fixed. As you can imagine however, at the moment we're spending all our time improving, supporting, and promoting TopDesk so that we can ensure its continued development.

We'd like to see the bug fixed, and we're also annoyed about it (we use TopDesk too, remember ), but again, it's a matter of time and resources. Unfortunately we're a small company, and don't have either to spare.