#5 Mouse hover over applet doesn't work correctly

[Jeff Leigh]

If you go to:

http://www.fantasyasylum.com/

there is a ticker on the right side of the screen. You
are supposed to be able to hover the mouse over a news
story and the ticker will pause until you move the
mouse away. This works correctly in Safari. It only
works in Mozilla when I remove the JavaEmbeddingPlugin.
The MJRPlugin appears to work correctly.

Mozilla 1.8a3 (2004082408 build)
Java 1.4.2 Update 1
OS X 10.3.5

[Steven Michaud]

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I've now tried this URL with Mozilla 1.7.2 on Mac OS X 1.2.8
with Java 1.4.1 and with both Mozilla 1.7.2 and
1.8a3-20040824 on OS X 10.3.5 with Java 1.4.2 Update 1.

On all of these I've found that the mouse-over _does_ work
with JEP 0.8.3 installed -- just a bit flakily. Sometimes,
to get the scrolling to stop you need to move the mouse over
the text, away from the text, and over it again. Moving it
down from the top seems to work better than moving it up
from the bottom.

Once you've clicked the mouse anywhere in the window's
"content region" (i.e. everything but the title bar and the
"grow region" in the lower right), the focus is no longer in
the applet and mouse-over doesn't work at all. You need to
click somewhere in the applet to get it working again.

I don't know what causes the flakiness, so I don't know what
to do about it. But I think it might have something to do
with the applet's notion of what its boundaries are, or of
where the scrolling blocks of text are currently located.
I've dealt with mouse-over capability in applets before,
because one of Sun's sample applets supports it (the "Live
Feedback ImageMap" -- in fact I had to do a lot of digging
around in undocumented Cocoa functions to get it to work at
all). I've seen similar flakiness there: The sample works
fine if all of it is showing (i.e. if none of it has been
clipped). But if the sample image _has_ been clipped,
mouse-overs sometimes don't work near the (clipped) edge.
In the case of the fantasyasylum applet, there's flakiness
even if the applet isn't clipped. But the "boundaries"
issue may still come into play, since the scrolling blocks
of text are themselves often partially clipped.

As for the focus issue, I've made the design decision to
only do anything in an applet if it has the focus. I'll
reconsider this, but (off the top of my head) I'm not sure
I'll be able to change it.

[Jeff Leigh]

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I wouldn't worry about the focus issue. It behaves exactly
like that in Safari too.

[Steven Michaud]

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The mouse-over problem is (or should be) fixed as of Java
Embedding Plugin version 0.8.4, released today.

The focus problem is partially fixed (as long as there isn't
more than one applet on a single page (or tab) that supports
mouse-overs) -- even if no applet currently has the focus,
mouse-overs will still "work" in the applet that most
recently had the focus.

See item #6 in JEP 0.8.4's Changes.txt for more information.