René J.V. Bertin posted on Fri, 03 Mar 2017 10:31:27 +0100 as excerpted:
>> firefox inhibiting auto-locking (but /not/ screen blanking and
>> power-down)
>
> Really? Is that possible nowadays with Plasma5? The failure to disable
> the screensaver automatically (or even by putting the mouse pointer in a
> hot corner) has always been one of the few big annoyances of Plasma4 for
> us. OTOH, I cannot recall ever having seen the X server enter the
> screensaver or blanking while anything else but a screensaver was
> drawing on the screen, so the part in parentheses surprises me a bit.
It rather shocked me too, and took me awhile to figure out that's what it
was doing, but eventually I realized that when I had youtube going in
firefox (as opposed to when it was a normal web page), I'd get the screen
blanks and powerdowns, but when I turned them back on, I wouldn't have
the password dialog that I'd get otherwise.
So firefox seems to be doing /something/ to disable the screen locking.
I think what firefox is /trying/ to do is disable the screensaver/
screenblanker as well as the screenlocker, as is not uncommon
functionality for video players (at one point one was apparently hacking
things by faking keyboard input every few minutes, as I remember reading
a blog post calling them out for using that workaround instead of
disabling the screensavers using normal X calls), but for some reason
it's not working that way and only disabling the screenlocker. I
supposed that was due to firefox being gtk-based and there being some
difference between the gtk/gnome calls and the qt/plasma calls in that
regard, but that's just a guess.
Or anyway, it was last summer. Now I tend to keep the screen blankers
disabled anyway and just turn things off manually if I want them off, as
I kind of got used to it working that way after having to disable the
automatic stuff last summer. Tho as I said the automatic stuff seems to
work now if I turn it on, unlike the problems I had last summer. But I
haven't tested the firefox/youtube lock-disabling recently.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
