In Linux, running Enlightenment (probably other window managers too), you can make a window larger than the screen, either by window.open("someurl","windowname","width=5000,height=5000"); or by self.resizeTo(5000,5000); Not only is the window larger than the screen, it's potentially larger than the total area of your virtual desktop. This is related to bug 103454, about moving a window's titlebar off the screen. It's a security problem, because it allows for window spoofing, not to mention it slows my P3 to a crawl to the point of locking it up for a minute or so. nsWindowWatcher.cpp contains some code which enforces safe window size and position, but it doesn't enforce a maximum size. On Windows and Mac, this seems to be enforced somewhere down in the paltform-specific widget code - you just can't create a window larger than the screen. Not so on Linux. We could potentially solve this by implementing maximum size restrictions (based on screen size) in nsWindowWatcher.cpp. I'll try that and see if it's effective. That may not be the best solution, this may be better handled down in the Unix-specific code, I'm not sure.

One comment. There are plenty of good reasons to be able to make the window bigger than screen size. The _user_ should be allowed to do it, using the window manager to resize the window. I'm not sure we can differentiate between a user-initiated resize and a script-initiated one in the widget code (I hope not, actually, for the sake of our code. :) ). If we can, by all means let's do this in widget code. Otherwise, we need to filter these calls at a higher level. I don't believe there is a way to get the virtual desktop size reliably, but if there is limiting to the size of the virtual desktop seems like a reasonable option to me.

This shouldn't be enforced in the widget code. The gtk code used to do this but it caused a lot of embedding-related bugs. It's relatively simple to get that information in the resizeTo() handler code and make sure that the window can't be resized outside of the bounds of the window. There's already code that gets the size of the virtual desktop in the widget interfaces.

-> danm (thanks!)

Also see bug 161903 [Add pref for overriding window size options on window.open()].

Update target milestone to 'Future' since this missed the 'mozilla1.1beta' train.

The bug/capability might actually be useful, sometimes. I've often wondered how they make those nifty screenshots of looong webpages in magazines. This may be a way - you can make a snapshot of a window, and I suppose that would include the area of the window that is off-screen. Making the window so large manually seems hard to do, but with a script it could be done, unless this bug is fixed. (Of course, there's probably another way to do it, as I doubt they do it like this in the magazines.)

Is this resolved after bug 239876?

Likely so. I can't verify.

The URL I just put in the URL bar still resizes the window with a build pulled May 8 from CVS.

Ah. The first report talks about window.open or resize. The window.open problem should be fixed, while the resize issue remains. It is likely that the patch from bug 239876 could be adapted for this too.

*** Bug 304123 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Still happening on firefox 3.0.2.