Hidden window in Mozilla products in OS X?

Antony · Last edited by Antony on 12 Jul, 2004 4:47 am; edited once(1)

Today, when I use Thunderbird in my PowerMac G4

(dual 1.42), I noticed that there's a hidden which does not show, but would only appear when I press F9. (the Exposé

)

I am now in another computer, PowerBook

, I noticed the same thing. Usually I don't have any Mozilla products installed in my PowerBook, but in order to check Netscape's secnews, I decided to install Mozilla 1.7 (for OS X of course). Again, with the Exposé

again (F9), I noticed the hidden window again.

(Detail of the screenshot: Quit Safari, Quit Mozilla 1.7, and re-launch it. then pressed F9. Screenshot taken by Snapz Pro X (licensed copy). http://sillydog.org/

is the default home page of my Mozilla 1.7, and I haven't surfed to any other pages.)

From the above screenshot, the smaller window labelled "hidden" would only appear under Exposé

. It is well hidden under normal usage. What is the hidden window for?

I checked Safari

browser, no hidden windows at all. I will check if this exist in Firefox when I back to my PowerMac G4

.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.8

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Wellander · Joined: 21 Oct 2002 Posts: 2576

Hi,
F9 opens the sidebar in Windows.
I do not think that Mozilla is spying.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.1) Gecko/20040707

Antony · *11 Jul, 2004 9:32 pm*

Wellander,
F9 is the default key to reveal all the opened windows in your desktop. You need Mac OS X

Panther

for this feature. This is one of the coolest feature in Panther Panther

called Exposé

.

Same results if I assign the All Windows (Exposé

) to other keys or using the mouse.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.8

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DJGM · *11 Jul, 2004 10:02 pm*

Hmmm, I've noticed that "hidden" window myself, when using the "Expose" feature of Mac OS X 10.3.x.

The thing is . . . I don't know what it is or what it's for either. Since it only happens with Mozilla
products on Mac OS X 10.3.x, if there weren't so many ignorant Mac bashers there, I would
have suggested raising this particular issue on the MozillaZine forums, to find out more.

Other than that, I dunno who else, or where else to ask about it . . .

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.9.2

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Antony · *11 Jul, 2004 10:11 pm*

I noticed that sometime ago, but never thought of bringing it up.

Antony · *12 Jul, 2004 12:10 am*

Joji · Joined: 26 Dec 2002 Posts: 93 Location: Tokyo, Japan

Antony · *12 Jul, 2004 4:46 am*

Thank you very much, Joji.

Now, it is not spying, and the mysterious "hidden" window is for some reason. Still annoying.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.8

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Antony · *19 Aug, 2004 8:40 pm*

Just a following up,

the Hidden window appears in Thunderbird, Mozilla (Application Suite), Firefox and Netscape 7.2 for Mac OS X.
It does not appear in Camino.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.9

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Al · Joined: 20 Dec 2002 Posts: 1696

Josh · Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 689

macsrwe · *Macs R We* Joined: 11 Jan 2005 Posts: 1

I saw this issue answered elsewhere...

Apparently, Mozilla got tripped up by the fact that on Macs (unlike other OSes) closing the last window is NOT a directive to quit the application. So they had to invent a "last window" that the user could never close. Hence the hidden window. Exposé apparently defeats the clever mechanism they used to keep it hidden.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12

Antony · *11 Jan, 2005 1:23 am*

Thanks macsrwe,

The hidden window issue was fixed in Firefox 1.0 PR1

. The close window has different behaviour to exit applications. It's not Exposé defeats the mechanism they use, but the fact that they did not follow Apple Human Interface Guidelines

, and Apple Software Design Guidelines

.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12

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