In FF3b4 and all previous versions of Firefox, the location bar and all other autocomplete widgets appeared as normal drop-down fields, and were treated as such by the window manager. In FF3b5, autocomplete drop downs have been promoted to some kind of window (dialog, perhaps, but not top level window) which the window manager places with an annoying animation. The annoying animation is the window manager's problem, but it's Firefox's responsibility to advise the window manager that something is or isn't a real window. Somewhere between b4 and b5, this advice changed.

What distribution are you using? bug 412954 added a hint type to windows and they are considered differently by Compiz. The issue can be fixed by changing the Compiz configuration.

I noticed the bug while using Ubuntu 7.10. I will try the config workarounds (or un-workarounds) mentioned in bug 412954. Thanks for the tip.

(In reply to comment #0) > In FF3b4 and all previous versions of Firefox, the location bar and all other > autocomplete widgets appeared as normal drop-down fields, and were treated as > such by the window manager. In FF3b5, autocomplete drop downs have been > promoted to some kind of window (dialog, perhaps, but not top level window) > which the window manager places with an annoying animation. > > The annoying animation is the window manager's problem, but it's Firefox's > responsibility to advise the window manager that something is or isn't a real > window. Somewhere between b4 and b5, this advice changed. Firefox 3 Beta 5 sets the correct window hints. It's flagging its popups as MENU, TOOLTIP or UTILITY, depending on what they are, where it was setting them to NORMAL (certainly not correct) before, which was translated to DROPDOWNMENU by a crude workaround / quirk inside Compiz Fusion. Beta 4 -> Beta 5 brought an improvement in this area, not a regression. Ubuntu should fix their Compiz default animations, I vote for this bug being closed.

Yes, this is a Ubuntu + Compiz issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz-fusion-plugins-main/+bug/212542 Instructions how to fix this: See http://daniel1992.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/fixing-the-dropdown-bug-in-ff3b5/

Thanks for clearing this up for me.