The term transient/popup I use may not be correct for the chromium/firefox windows in question; my apologies if misleading.

If anyone else has experienced this or can verify same behaviour, it would be useful to know a tthis stage. If anyone has any ideas to solve it that would be great.



Essentially, using TWM on Linux (Slackware 15 in this case) and only with TWM, when selecting some menu options in applications with the mouse, where a 'popup' window appears to move the mouse over to select options, then instead of the popup displaying stable to interact with, it immediately is closed - rapidly (almost a flash at times) - allowing no interaction.

TWM with the base default config (or with a custom config) produces the same behaviour. Reading through the options has not revealed any thing of a solution and TWM has not changed but Chromium and Firefox have of course.

Two examples:

eg.

load chromium, mouse click on 'customise and control' button/elipse and the 'popup' window appears and holds position to select a setting option with the mouse.

this works initially, but once a webapage has been viewed, subsequent attempts to click the c&c button will rapidly open the window and then close it immediately allowing no interaction

e.g

drop down select inputs on html pages are unstable - open and close rapidly allowing no interaction

Loading up some 'added extension' config screens *sometimes* temorarily restores sanity, but this is quickly lost once a webpage is revisited.

It seems to be some changes incolving mouse code, popups and how TWM/X is tied in. Ive no idea really.


Similar behaviour with Firefox.

Some attempts to get to the bottom of this for Firefox at least, led to setting this 'work around fudge' option:

ui.popup.disable_autohide set to 'false'

This does somewhat stop the immediate open and close and leaves popup windows open and stable to interact with, but it creates other issues in that some keyboard navigations stops working and sometimes the window wont go away unless and option is created (a problem whe there is no close function).

I have put a quesiton to Mozilla Support forum, but no responses as yet (and not expected one might say given 'old' TWM, X etc).

All other window managers tested seem fine, it is just with TWM.

TWM is old, fair enough, but it has been fine on X right up until now and I suspect as TWM is not popular, the changes in Chromium and Firefox causing the issue have not come to light.

Chromium (currently using Version 114.0.5735.198) has presented this experience for a few releases (I cannot remember when it started) and Firefox, just in the last release update made 115.1.0esr (64-bit) is now carrying on the same. Previous releases work fine.

Once upon time I had similar issue, then I learned from some internet article these apps need a compositing manager running. Back then I solved it by installing and running picom. Just my 2¢.

For what it's worth, I was able to duplicate this issue, because your post piqued my interest.

I switched to TWM in --Current, then opened Firefox and logged back into LQ. If I go to the sidebar and right-click on, say, "Subscribed Threads" (intending to open them in a a new tab), the right-click pop-up menu window appears and then disappears quick like a bunny.