Menu items disappear when hovering

jeff · Jun 6, 2013, 1:11 PM

I am running pfSense-LiveCD-2.1-RC0-amd64-20130604-2053.iso and Firefox 21.0.

Similar behavior happens with other menus, but I'll use the VPN menu as an example.

Hovering over IPsec causes the IPsec menu item to disappear. Hovering over the OpenVPN item causes PPTP to disappear.

One more example is hovering over Service>Dynamic DNS causes IGMP Proxy to disappear.

jimp · Jun 6, 2013, 6:45 PM

Clear your cache. There is a background image that gets swapped in when hovering, and if your browser failed to fetch it, it would look like it had disappeared.

regonius · Jun 10, 2013, 10:11 AM

I'm running pfSense 2.1-RC0 (i386) and Chrome Version 27.0.1453.110

I'm observing disappearing submenus when hovering over the menu title (System, Interfaces, Firewall…) and then moving down to the submenus (Advanced, Cert Manager ...).
As soon as the mouse cursor leaves the text (e.g. System) and still hovers over the the small rest of the red bar below the text, the submenus disappear.
If you are quick enough with moving down to submenus you can catch them.
This doesn't seem to be related to clearing the cache. With Firefox (21.0) this problem does not exist. Neither does it with 2.0.3-RELEASE (i386) with the same browsers.

mjtbrady · Jul 31, 2013, 3:58 AM

I am seeing this second problem where the menu disappears a soon as I try to move the mouse to the sub items. Works fine in Firefox.

Chrome 28.0.1500.95 on Fedora 17 with KDE.
pfSense 2.1-RC0 (amd64) built on Sun Jul 28 14:39:40 EDT 201

gogol · Jul 31, 2013, 6:54 AM

I have this problem too with Safari on OSX Mountain Lion. Always thought it was an extension, because when I disabled extensions the problem was gone. Chrome was OK.

What happens if you first "click" on the title of the menu? Because that was always my "solution".
Emptying the cache didn't help.

jimp · Jul 31, 2013, 12:22 PM

It must be an extension or a browser setting. I have no problems on Chrome/Chromium on Windows, FreeBSD, or Ubuntu.

I have issues with Firefox sometimes blanking out menu items (The words disappear, the menu stays) but it's related to FF's broken "Hardware Acceleration" on this video card. With HA on, it garbles text, with HA off, certain elements disappear, but it's not specific to pfSense.

mjtbrady · Jul 31, 2013, 8:15 PM

I don't have any extensions installed.

I have had a quick look at my settings and can't see anything obvious. I will have a play around and see if I can figure out what it is.

jimp · Jul 31, 2013, 8:40 PM

The two reports I heard were both from Linux - one from Mint and one from Fedora.

If you are using Chrome, try Chromium or vice versa. Alternately, try Google's binaries instead of those from your distro's package manager.

wallabybob · Jul 31, 2013, 8:56 PM

I had something like this problem using Chromium on Ubuntu 12.04: the cursor seemed to need to travel quickly a fairly tight path to maintain the display of menu items when moving to the item to be selected. I upgraded to Chromium Version 28.0.1500.52 Ubuntu 12.04 (28.0.1500.52-0ubuntu1.12.04.2) through System Update and no longer seem to have the problem. I'm running

2.1-RC0 (i386)
built on Sun Jul 21 09:48:24 EDT 2013
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p8

mjtbrady · Jul 31, 2013, 9:42 PM

I am running Google binaries. Package is installed and kept up to date from Google's yum repo.

I have a mixture of pfSense 2.0.x releases, with just the one test 2.01 machine. This only occurs on the 2.1 machine.

adam65535 · Jul 31, 2013, 9:47 PM

@jimp:

The two reports I heard were both from Linux - one from Mint and one from Fedora.

If you are using Chrome, try Chromium or vice versa. Alternately, try Google's binaries instead of those from your distro's package manager.

Add me to the list running Fedora (19 x86_64) and having the problem with Chrome. I am using the official repository from google. The menus work fine when connecting to 2.0.3 versions of pfsense. All versions of 2.1 so far exhibit the issue. Pain in the arse it is :). I spend sometimes 10 seconds just trying to get it to select a menu option. I have just been delaying reporting it because it seemed like I was the only one experiencing it based on lack of threads about it. Since I don't know what is causing it I was hoping the upgrade to Fedora 19 (fresh install actually) would fix it a few days ago but it didn't.

google-chrome-stable-28.0.1500.71-209842.x86_64

The yum config in case anyone is wondering:
[google-chrome]
name=google-chrome
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

I actually have a new thread window opened with the title of "Drop down menus and Chrome" that I have been waiting to fill out and send… Looks like my procrastination has paid off... someone did it for me.

UPDATE: I just installed the latest fedora chromium and it has the same issue.

chromium.x86_64 0:27.0.1453.93-2.fc19

jimp · Jul 31, 2013, 10:49 PM

My Ubuntu laptop is running Chromium 28 from Ubuntu's repo and it's fine. FreeBSD is also on Chromium 28.0.1500.71 and it's OK. I haven't tried the "official" Google version yet. It's off now, if I remember, I'll give it a run tomorrow, unless one of my VMs actually works at the moment, which would be shocking.

It seems odd that it only affects certain setups, but (almost?) entirely Linux builds.

Any other common threads?

My Ubuntu laptop is 32-bit, FreeBSD is 64-bit. I build the FreeBSD one from source, Ubuntu laptop uses the Ubuntu package repository.

jimp · Aug 1, 2013, 2:28 AM

Also have any of you with problems completely cleared your cache in Chrome?

adam65535 · Aug 1, 2013, 2:41 AM

For me I installed the OS completely from scratch (for other reasons). There was no cache at all and I accessed the pfsense site first thing. When I just installed chromium it was also the first run of the browser so it's cache was empty too.

Now that i think about it though, I am going through a squid proxy. I will clear the cache tomorrow and go direct to rule that out but this is an https SSL site and it is not doing any decryption at the proxy to analyze https content so the squid proxy will not be caching the pfsense content.

jimp · Aug 1, 2013, 4:12 PM

I wiped a VM and installed Ubuntu 13.04 fresh and was able to reproduce it with the official Google .deb for Chrome. And now my Ubuntu laptop offered a Chromium update and it does it there, too.

It must be specific to this version of Chrome on Linux. It did not do this previously and it doesn't seem to affect any other platform aside from Linux (Windows is OK, so is FreeBSD)

Clicking on the menu bar before selecting the submenu does seem to work around it at least.

Has anyone reported it upstream, or looked for similar existing bug reports?

If someone can find an HTML change that can be made to "fix" it on pfSense, it would also be considered.

doktornotor · Aug 1, 2013, 4:26 PM

@jimp:

Has anyone reported it upstream, or looked for similar existing bug reports?

Report upstream? With bugs handling like this or this, no, thanks, I have better things to do with my time than wasting time with utterly moronic upstream who's only action is go Restrict-AddIssueComment-Commit once too many people have complained about the developers being morons.

adam65535 · Aug 1, 2013, 4:46 PM

@jimp:

Clicking on the menu bar before selecting the submenu does seem to work around it at least.

That work around doesn't really work reliably for me (it does sometimes). I usually have to go back and forth between moving the mouse over the menu bar and where the menu would open to several times at different speeds until the menu finally stays open for that time. If I keep going up to the menu though it will stop working again. When it gets to me I just use Firefox but I don't have many firewalls on 2.1 yet.

If I move the mouse cursor up to the menu and down at my normal slower mouse movement speed it doesn't work very often (25% of the time). If I quickly move the cursor up to the menu and down at very fast speed all in one quick motion it works about 80% of the time.

UPDATE: If i go very slow it will work near 0% of the time. On pfSense 2.0.3 it works every time regardless of course.

jimp · Aug 1, 2013, 6:39 PM

The speed thing works here too, and adds to the weirdness.

So it seems to be:

OK:
FreeBSD chromium-28.0.1500.71 (Compiled from source)
Windows Chrome 28.0.1500.95 m
OS X Chrome 28.0.1500.71
OS X Chrome 28.0.1500.95 (Tried before and after an update wanted to run)

Broken:
Chromium 28.0.1500.71 Built on Ubuntu 13.04, running on LinuxMint 15 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.13.04.1) - Installed from Software Manager
Chromium 28.0.1500.71 Ubuntu 13.04 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.13.04.1) - Installed from Software Center
Chrome 28.0.1500.95 - On Ubuntu and Mint - Installed from the .deb provided by Google

gerdesj · Aug 2, 2013, 10:17 AM

Add to OK: Chrome 29.0.1547.32_beta213282 from source (Gentoo amd64). This Chrome gets updated pretty regularly and I can't ever recall a problem in the 28 series either.

Just tried a test vm I have lying around with stock Ubuntu 13.04 on it - Chromium 28.0.1500.71 - nearly OK. The VM was accessed directly using its "console" through the vSphere client. There could be a timing issue of some sort on the menus. I can recreate the issue if I move my mouse too fast or in the wrong way - hard to explain but my Gentoo physical box has no problems whatsoever. It may be worth looking at the window manager. It generally works OK if I hover over the menu title for a second and then move to the menu item. The VPN menu is the least reliable for me perhaps because it has the shortest title.

Cheers
Jon

gogol · Aug 5, 2013, 3:21 PM

@jimp:

The speed thing works here too, and adds to the weirdness.

So it seems to be:

OK:
FreeBSD chromium-28.0.1500.71 (Compiled from source)
Windows Chrome 28.0.1500.95 m
OS X Chrome 28.0.1500.71
OS X Chrome 28.0.1500.95 (Tried before and after an update wanted to run)

Broken:
Chromium 28.0.1500.71 Built on Ubuntu 13.04, running on LinuxMint 15 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.13.04.1) - Installed from Software Manager
Chromium 28.0.1500.71 Ubuntu 13.04 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.13.04.1) - Installed from Software Center
Chrome 28.0.1500.95 - On Ubuntu and Mint - Installed from the .deb provided by Google

Please add as broken Safari 6.0.5 on OSX 10.8.4 with 1Password extension while Chrome 28.0.1500.95 with same extension works fine. Without extension Safari works fine. I think it is a scripting problem.

Edit: not very obvious, but I was using a non-native resolution on my iMac screen. When I switched to native resolution the problem was gone.