Create popup/panel without being on top OR hide URL & tab bar?

Add-ons Development
#1

I’m working on writing a new extension and I’d like the ability for it to open a clean, separate window without the URL or tab bar.

From what I can tell, the only way to do that is by passing type: popup or panel to the windows.create() JS API. However, windows created in this method are always on top of all other Firefox windows, at least on my machine (Ubuntu).

The alternative would be to create a regular window, but hide the tab and URL bars. This doesn’t seem possible to do either, at least not on an individual window.

Is it possible for me to accomplish what I’m looking for in Firefox?

Thanks!

#2

The “always on top” sounds like a bug, and indeed it is, and a pretty old one:

The “good news” is, this affect only Linux users :upside_down_face:.

So for most users, it should work fine.
You can use await browser.runtime.getPlatformInfo() to detect Linux OS and use normal windows as workaround… not great I know.

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#3

Thank you @juraj.masiar! I hadn’t considered the behavior was a bug! I did test on a clean Ubuntu VM where it reproduced, but without easy access to a Windows or Mac OS system anymore, I was not able to test there as well.

I’ll drop a comment on the bug to see if they have any suggestions or timeframe. I certainly appreciate your help with the quick response and discovering the cause.

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