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OpusOne

Member

Registered: 2023-05-31

Posts: 186

[SOLVED] Thunderbird on Wayland: mouse issues

Hi,

I've been having major issues with Thunderbird on Wayland (KDE Plasma, if that makes a difference) for a while. Can't tell exactly from which versions of Thunderbird/Plasma it all started, but it wasn't always like that for sure. Note that it's the absolutely *only* app that has this weird behavior of all the apps I use, including Firefox, which works plenty fine (I would have assumed that Firefox and Thunderbird shared significant common code, but that may not be the case, who knows.)

The annoying behavior is that (usually after Thunderbird has run for a while, the issue rarely starts right after Thunderbird is launched) hovering various parts of the Thunderbird GUI with the mouse will trigger actions. For instance, hovering over the top part of a list or text pane will scroll it upwards (conversely downwards if hovering over the bottom part). Or, hovering over tree views (like the accounts with their subfolders) will expand all subitems. All that, just by hovering the mouse. No click anywhere whatsoever. Quitting and relaunching Thunderbird when it starts happening gets us back to a "normal" state, for a while, until it starts misbehaving again.

I'm suspecting this has something to do with a shaky Wayland support. Has anyone else run into this issue? As it's probably related to Wayland, if you haven't and are not using Wayland, then it's probably of no use to post that everything works fine for you.

Curious about that. I've tried finding similar reports, but haven't found anything much. (Then again, finding specific bug reports for Thunderbird is a very tedious job.)

Last edited by OpusOne (2023-11-15 00:14:33)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,612

Re: [SOLVED] Thunderbird on Wayland: mouse issues

Plasma on Wayland here, using Thunderbird as my email client (and Firefox as my browser).  Never seen anything like what you describe.   
I system uses Intel Iris Xe graphics.  What GPU have you?

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OpusOne

Member

Registered: 2023-05-31

Posts: 186

Re: [SOLVED] Thunderbird on Wayland: mouse issues

An AMD 6650XT. I also have a dual-monitor setup, if that could make a difference here.

Edit: digging into this a bit more, I found out that Thunderbird had native Wayland support, but that it was not enabled by default/automatically when run on Wayland. It requires an environment variable to be set, as can be seen here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Thunderbird#Wayland

So, I'm testing it with this env. variable set. The issue mentioned earlier only appears after a while usually, so I'll report back after Thunderbird has run for long enough and if things look good, I'll mark this as solved. So far, what I'm noticing is that the UI appears snappier.

Last edited by OpusOne (2023-11-12 01:08:20)

OpusOne

Member

Registered: 2023-05-31

Posts: 186

Re: [SOLVED] Thunderbird on Wayland: mouse issues

After having run for a few days like this, Thunderbird appears much more stable UI-wise on Wayland, and hasn't exhibited the odd behavior described above. So I consider this solved.

For anyone running Thunderbird on Wayland, I do recommend running it with the following environment variable:

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1