Firefox Moves to the Right

[GeoffTF]

I have just installed Linux Mint 21 Vanessa with the Cinnamon desktop. I seem to have got everything working, but there is one niggling problem that I have been unable to fix. If I move the Firefox window to the right of the screen, close the window and relaunch Firefox, the window moves to the right, and I have to move it back again. This problem does not seem to occur with LibreOffice Writer or the text Editor. It appears to be Firefox specific. How do I fix it?

[mikeflan]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

It appears to be Firefox specific.

Not on my LM 19.3. LibreOffice Calc does it also, and I am thankful it does.
If you consider this as a problem use wmctrl to move the window where you want it.

Get position of all open windows and programs:

Code: Select all

wmctrl -lG

Then position your window:

Code: Select all

wmctrl -r copy5 -e 0,142,795,631,222

[GeoffTF]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

It appears to be Firefox specific.

Not on my LM 19.3. LibreOffice Calc does it also, and I am thankful it does.
If you consider this as a problem use wmctrl to move the window where you want it.

Get position of all open windows and programs:

Code: Select all

wmctrl -lG

Then position your window:

Code: Select all

wmctrl -r copy5 -e 0,142,795,631,222

LibreOffice Calc successfully restores windows to their previous location with LM 21 and Cinnamon. In my experience, Firefox (perhaps all earlier versions of Firefox) did that correctly on Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu, various Apple Macs and all versions of Windows, except early releases of Windows 10.

If you already have a Firefox window open and launch a new window, I can understand why it would be an advantage to open the new window in an offset position. That is not the issue here. I want Firefox to remember the position of its window when I close it down, and restore the position of that window when it is relaunched. I expect that I could get round the problem by kicking off a script to launch Firefox where I want it (top left corner in the top left of the screen), rather than launching Firefox directly. Nonetheless, I expect that this issue will inconvenience others too.

[Cosmo.]

Your description seems to be faulty:

If I move the Firefox window to the right of the screen, close the window and relaunch Firefox, the window moves to the right

If the window is already on the right, how can it move to the right?

But besides that, I confirm, that there is a problem. FF does not open in the place and in the size, as it has been closed. It took me some clicking experiments, until I got it as I wanted. The behavior is terrible inconsistent. The same FF version works perfectly in 20.3.

What helped me (after much clicking):
Install dconf-editor. Go to /org/cinnamon/muffin and play with the values auto-maximize and center-new-windows. Turn them on and off, shut FF down and launch it again and repeat this several times; do the same with the size of FF. As I said, the behavior is strongly inconsistent, so do not expect a logic in it. I got it to work, after I tried it long enough.

(The alternative is to use the calculable 20.3.)

[GeoffTF]

Your description seems to be faulty:

If I move the Firefox window to the right of the screen, close the window and relaunch Firefox, the window moves to the right

If the window is already on the right, how can it move to the right?

But besides that, I confirm, that there is a problem. FF does not open in the place and in the size, as it has been closed. It took me some clicking experiments, until I got it as I wanted. The behavior is terrible inconsistent. The same FF version works perfectly in 20.3.

What helped me (after much clicking):
Install dconf-editor. Go to /org/cinnamon/muffin and play with the values auto-maximize and center-new-windows. Turn them on and off, shut FF down and launch it again and repeat this several times; do the same with the size of FF. As I said, the behavior is strongly inconsistent, so do not expect a logic in it. I got it to work, after I tried it long enough.

(The alternative is to use the calculable 20.3.)

Thanks for that Cosmo. Sorry about the typo. I meant "If I move the Firefox window to the LEFT of the screen, close the window and relaunch Firefox, the window moves to the right". It is good to hear that this problem does not occur on 20.3 with the same version of Firefox. So far, I have not noticed a problem with any other application. Is Cinnamon treating Firefox differently? What has been changed in Cinnamon that might have caused this problem?

[Cosmo.]

I wrote already, that the behavior is missing any kind of logic and so far it is not predictable, one of the most annoying bugs.

Cinnamon has partly been rewritten and there are more than half a dozen side effects of it. IMO the rewrite is not yet prime time ready and should had been moved to the next version. Especially, as the version numbers for Cinnamon did not indicate a major release change. (My last sentence in brackets is a consequence of the current situation.)

[GeoffTF]

Thanks Cosmo. That is a lot clearer. LM 20.3 is supported until 2025. LM 22 should be available by then. Is my best course of action to skip LM 21 and wait for LM 23? It would be a pain to have to configure everything up again, but I guess it would be easier now than later.

I had been using Xubuntu 20.04, which was fine provided that I avoided Snaps. Changing the accent colour still does not work correctly in LM 22 Xfce. Some windows have the changed colour for the close button, and others have the original green. I find that irritating. Cinnamon seems to be fine so far (after one day), apart from the window positioning.

[Cosmo.]

Is my best course of action to skip LM 21 and wait for LM 23?

Why 23? Or is this another typo? The future is not predictable, but I expect, that the Mint devs sort the bugs out and not only in 2 or 4 years. I personally will take a look (in a virtual machine) at 21.1, when it arrives and check with my list of bugs, where I have to look at first. The current LM 21 is for me dead, especially as it does not have a real progress.

[GeoffTF]

Is my best course of action to skip LM 21 and wait for LM 23?

Why 23? Or is this another typo? The future is not predictable, but I expect, that the Mint devs sort the bugs out and not only in 2 or 4 years. I personally will take a look (in a virtual machine) at 21.1, when it arrives and check with my list of bugs, where I have to look at first. The current LM 21 is for me dead, especially as it does not have a real progress.

Sorry I meant LM 22. I am getting careless in this heat. Installing LM 20.3 looks sensible, Hopefully, we will have a better behaved 21.1.

[GeoffTF]

I have tried downloading LM 20.3 Cinnamon twice. It failed the integrity check in the same way on both occasions. All my downloads have succeeded on previous occasions, and I have followed exactly the same procedure. I will put up with LM 21 for now.

[Cosmo.]

The most usual user mistake is the download of the 2 sha* files. Did you right click them and selected to "save file as..."? Did you try another mirror?

[GeoffTF]

Yes, I followed the instructions precisely. I did the both downloads from the University of Kent mirror, so it is possible that they have a corruption there. Beginner that I am, I have had a look at the LM release cycle. It looks like we will have an update in the new year. So far, there is nothing so bad with LM 21 that I cannot continue until then, when I should be able to do a simple upgrade.

[Cosmo.]

It looks like we will have an update in the new year.

If you mean regarding the existing ISO files, than the answer is: Never. And even in the hypothetical case the sha* files would also get exchanged. There will be a new version in the near of the change of the years.

[GeoffTF]

The table here says that there has been a new version of LM in June/July and December/January each year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint

That suggests that LM 21.1 is likely be released in January next year, if not before. There are separate ISO downloads for LM 20 and LM 20.1, and similarly for previous versions:

https://linuxmint.com/download_all.php

Am I wrong in assuming that there is likely to be a release of LM 21.1 with bug fixes by the end of January 2021?

[Cosmo.]

Perhaps we misunderstood each other:

Yes, roughly every 6 months there comes a new version of Mint. And yes, this new version includes also bug fixes. And yes again, 21.1 will likely(!) arrive in the near of the change of the years.

I had assumed you want to know, if bug fixes will be implemented in a updated version of the ISO images for LM 21, and this I answered with "never".

[GeoffTF]

I have installed Chromium from the LM repository. Chromium successfully remembers its window position. LibreOfice was maximizing windows when I first opened them after importing them from Windows 10. That was fixed by:

Code: Select all

gsettings set org.cinnamon.muffin auto-maximize false

LibreOffice now seems to remember not only LM window positions, but also those from Windows. I prefer Firefox, but hopefully this bug will be fixed.