> Sometimes Netscape will pop open a dialogue window
   > (cookies, sending things, switching from secure to
   > insecure, asking for a password, etc.) but the geometry is
   > totally whacked out.  My window manager (gwm) deals with
   > this by drawing a frame around a 0x0 window, leaving me
   > with a four-pixel-wide vertical bar the normal height of a
   > window decoration.

   fvwm95 and kwm do the same. :-I

   > When such a dialogue box opens, Netscape will stop doing
   > anything else until it is dealt with by the user;
   > sometimes this is as simple as resizing the tiny window,
   > but sometimes you can't do that (you can end up with a
   > bigger grey window) -- when that happens, if you are
   > lucky, just hitting return on the tiny window will
   > generate a response to the dialogue box, letting you
   > continue.
   > 
   > Deleting the tiny window also sometimes helps.

   Sometimes, yes... and sometimes Netscape just opens more of these
   zero-sized windows (I have closed over 20 of them before killing
   Netscape).

   Sigh.

     -jm



In my day job, I do web ui design and development.  After fiddling around
with Netscape a lot over the last year, it appears that the above behavior
is caused by unexpected async. events from Xlib.  If you manage to enlarge
the window [tvtwm that I use here allows me to do such things], it will
mention something alone the lines of "Unexpected Async. event....".  The
Java VM inside of Netscape appears to trigger this.

The only two things that I have found that help this is to turn off Java
completely.  Or to start netscape with the '-synchronous' flag, which
Netscape seems to support, but doesn't advertise.  Of course, there is a
performance penalty for doing this.

Javascript seems to be ok in the BSDI versions of Netscape.



Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org   http://anduin.eldar.org
[finger brad@anduin.eldar.org for PGP public key]