Confirmed specific to 10.4Fx, though I have no idea why. STRs cause failure in 10.4Fx b9, but not in Firefox b9.

1. Type http:// such that the awesome bar appears.
2. Type gibberish such that it does not.

The awesome bar is now "dead" for that window, although hitting TAB for suggestions still works, implying it is simply not being displayed.

This is not a blocker, but we need to repair this.

This is somewhat mitigated with large histories, obviously. New windows and tabs fix the problem.

The awesome bar appears to still be here and still gets events. You can TAB to (invisible) suggestions, and you can use arrow keys. Perhaps it's not that the awesome bar is invisible but that it's behind the window it's attached to.

However, other things that make the awesome bar drop down disappear allow it to come back later, so there must be something specific about underflowing the result.

Things that it is not:

• It is not due to our fix for issue 9 (backing that out made no difference)

• It is not due to ClosePopup() in toolkit/components/autocomplete/src/nsAutoCompleteController.cpp (making the function return NS_OK made no difference; the popup still closed)

Currently homing in on toolkit/content/widgets/autocomplete.xml ...

Making the changes to the autocomplete widget had unexpected side effects. So we took a different tack.

The only time that the awesome bar goes bad is when it runs out of suggestions -- other things that close it work (for reasons unclear to me). Since I'm not sure how to fix that, the other solution is ... never let it run out of suggestions. If toolkit/components/places/src/nsPlacesAutoComplete.js finds that no matches are returned, it makes a bogus placeholder that is blank, so it just looks like a blank dropdown. This is totally shippable, and totally works -- the awesomebar now functions otherwise normally.

Until I figure out how to get rid of that, this is an acceptable compromise (so issues complaining about the blank Awesome bar will be wontfixed unless the real cause is discovered). This has no other side effects, so this is now Verified.

Side-effect alert:

This breaks at least the Omnibar and Cybersearch plugins and possibly many others, causing them to delete the contents of the URL bar whenever the blank placeholder would normally appear, it took me a while to correlate it to this bugfix.

In addition to causing extension problems, I'm thinking this bugfix might be problematic when Mozilla retires the search box, as it seems to interfere with anything wanting to serve up search suggestions in the awesome bar.

Please post the screenshot I asked for in the tenderapp ticket; I'm already aware of the issue.