I think the problem is that the XUL onresize event is a bit crappy but my knowledge is not specific enough to be sure of that.

In short from a user’s perspective, resizing the Firefox window does not necessarily resize/force a re-render of the viewport. It is my understanding that this is why the Web Developer Toolbar has always had the “Resize the viewport” option under Resize > Resize Window…

I’m not convinced this problem is directly related to a overloaded status bar at all.

I’ve found that the Organize Status Bar extension is helpful in taking back control of your status bar.

Thanks for the tip, Richard. That’s slimmed my bar down a little.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1759

Sure, we could all could get rid of a few extensions, but that’s not really the point. The fact remains that the behavior of the chrome shouldn’t in any way be able to influence the way any site/page renders. The rendering engine should be 100% insulated from what is happening at the browser interface level.

Of the extensions I run:

Gmail Managers steals the most space, but I run two Gmail accounts so minimizing it’s display makes it less useful.

Adblock is great — personally I mostly use it to block those incessant animated avatars from forums — but it’s a waste of space in the status bar. I’d be happy to lose it from there if I could — or at least reduce it to a small icon.

HTML Validator, Stylish, PasswordMaker, Greasemonkey, No Scripts, DustMe and Firebug are all used every week (if not every day) and to me are well worthy of my prime status bar real estate.

On top of that, to write about this stuff here and in the newsletter, you really need to be playing with this stuff to find out what’s genuinely useful. For every five or ten you test, one might be worth writing about, but you have to find it.

A lot of the guys I work with have a lot of extensions enabled. In the end we just had to make a call that browser weirdness problems always required a retest with either extensions disabled, or at least a minimal set enabled. Reality is you don’t really need them all enabled all the time.

Wow Alex! Surely you don’t need all those extensions? Time for spring cleaning a little early? :) As far as what Rick said, I have also used ‘Page Saver’ for screenshots, and have recently been taking a look at FireShot, which also allows annotations to be placed in the image. This, like Page Saver, places the button to the direct right of the search engine text field (where your Skype button is). Good golly you have a lot of addons!

Regardless of any and all suggestions, thanks for pointing out this bug, it’ll be useful to know in case other people report problems that I cannot reproduce!

I just do not understand how inconsistant companies like Microsoft / Mozilla et al can be by making things like add-ons for their products when the actual webpage translations still, to this very day, have yet to be consistant and standardized and display properly across all platforms. There is no excuse for this when the Internet of today has become a primary communication medium! Is this not the MAIN purpose of a browser anyway!?

…Things need to get back to basics and the closet needs to be cleaned out before they start worrying about what toppings are on the sundae.