brave
context-menu drop shadow is not correctly rendered on Linux
Description
The newly added drop shadow for context menus is not correctly working on Linux. I am kinda getting tired of these minor design changes that are poorly executed and have such a high impact on functionality.
Steps to reproduce
- open the context menu
- hover over menu items and see how the drop shadow gets re-rendered on top of each other
Actual result
you can see the drop shadown getting "thicker" with each time hovering over a menu item:
Expected result
it looks okay with white background
Reproduces how often
Easily reproduced
Brave version (brave://version info)
Brave 1.67.123 Chromium: 126.0.6478.126 (Official Build) (64-bit) Revision fc7619ef621fe4e6a0fa8b16c718f78ffc97a861 OS Linux JavaScript V8 12.6.228.21 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Command Line /opt/brave.com/brave/brave --disable-domain-reliability --enable-dom-distiller --enable-distillability-service --origin-trial-public-key=bYUKPJoPnCxeNvu72j4EmPuK7tr1PAC7SHh8ld9Mw3E=,fMS4mpO6buLQ/QMd+zJmxzty/VQ6B1EUZqoCU04zoRU= --sync-url=https://sync-v2.brave.com/v2 --lso-url=https://no-thanks.invalid --variations-server-url=https://variations.brave.com/seed --variations-insecure-server-url=https://variations.brave.com/seed --flag-switches-begin --enable-features=PostQuantumKyber --flag-switches-end --component-updater=url-source=https://go-updater.brave.com/extensions --origin-trial-disabled-features=CaptureHandle Executable Path /opt/brave.com/brave/brave Profile Path /home/doebi/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default Active Variations AllowCertainClientHintsStudy:Enabled BraveAIChatEnabledStudy:Enabled BraveAdblockMobileNotificationsListDefault:Enabled BraveAds.CreativeAdModelBasedPredictorRecencyStudy:NoRecency BraveAdsAdEventStudy:Enabled BraveAdsConversionsStudy:Enabled BraveAdsExclusionRulesStudy:Enabled BraveAdsNewTabPageAdsStudy:Enabled BraveAdsSiteVisitStudy:Enabled BraveAdsTextClassificationPageProbabilitiesStudy:Enabled BraveAggressiveModeRetirementExperiment:Disabled BraveAutoTranslateStudy:AutoTranslateDisabled BraveDebounceStudy:Enabled BraveFeedUpdateStudy:Enabled BraveForgetFirstPartyStorage:Enabled BraveGoogleSignInPermissionStudy:Enabled BraveHorizontalTabsUpdateEnabledStudy:Enabled BraveP3AConstellationEnabled:Enabled BraveP3AJSONOtherDeprecation:Enabled BraveP3ATypicalJSONDeprecationEnabled:Enabled BraveRewardsAllowSelfCustodyProvidersStudy:Enabled BraveRewardsWebUiPanelStudy:Enabled BraveScreenFingerprintingBlockerStudy:Enabled BraveSearchAdStudy:Enabled BraveSearchPromotionBannerStudyOnStable:Default BraveWalletAnkrBalancesEnabled:Default ClampPlatformVersionClientHint:Disabled CookieListDefaultStudy:Enabled Default1pBlockingStudy:Disabled DisableReduceLanguage:Enabled EphemeralStorageStudy:Enabled ExtensionsManifestV2StudyRelease:Default PartitionedCookies:Enabled UserActivityStudy:Triggers WhatsNewStudy:Enabled
Channel information
- [X] release (stable)
- [ ] beta
- [ ] nightly
Reproducibility
- [ ] with Brave Shields disabled
- [ ] with Brave Rewards disabled
- [ ] in the latest version of Chrome
Miscellaneous information
No response
Hey, I just tried to reproduce this in 1.69.115 and wasn't able to. To help with debugging could you provide the following info:
- What distro/desktop environment are you using?
- Are you using Wayland or X?
- Is Brave using software rendering, or your GPU?
It looks like something is going wrong with transparency in the compositor (not sure if in Brave or in your WM). cc @simonhong have you seen this before?
Thanks for looking into this.
Regarding your questions:
- Ubuntu Jammy + i3wm
- i3 uses X
- How do I determine?
Anything else I can you provide you with?
Hello there. Just downgraded brave for the same problem. I'm using fluxbox wm but the problem, I think, is the same for any window manager that does not provide a (useless) compositor on its own. As a workaround, using picom (or compton) fixes the issue but a chance to revert to the "shadowless" menu will be greatly appreciated.
Cool that's super helpful @pemazzon - can you confirm it doesn't happen in Chromium?
Hello. With chromium the drop down menu is rectangular with no shadows: no problem. In chrome-stable the menu has rounded corners and you can see the corners are not transparent. As a comparison firefox has menus with rounded corners that renders correctly. Anyway the biggest issue is with the dropped-down shadow.
@simonhong I guess this is related to the refactor of the menus that went through a little while back
I'd like to add a couple of points here:
- even without picom the "tabs menu" you get by clicking on the "v" button on the upper right renders perfectly with both rounded corners and a (nice) slight shadow (why don't use this widget?);
- the problem with the drop down shadows is related to gtk4 and a couple of wannabes developers who think they know best.
Hmmm, I wonder if it's because that tabs menu is a webview, while the context/app menu are native views? Maybe we're treating the webview specially.
Man, that really sucks that this shadows issue is wontfix :disappointed:
Does this mean you're both using X11 with no compositor?
Hello. Yes, like many (...more than you probably think :wink:) users I'm not using a compositor to waste CPU cycles...
Anyway: this same problem is also present on gtk-3 applications, like reported here but in that case there is a workaround. You can change the gtk-3 theme by using one that doesn't use "shadowed" widgets: edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and put something like:
[Settings]
gtk-theme-name=Adwaita-dark
I have tried it on a fresh ubuntu 22 VM and you can see the before-and-after comparison on the gnome-control-center.
It looks like you can do something similar with gtk-4 by editing ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css and putting:
* {
border-radius: 0px;
box-shadow: 0px;
}
but brave-browser doesn't seem to honor any of them. As far as I understand google-chrome (...and so brave?) uses its own "Aura" toolkit?
I'm still stuck with brave-1.66 on Arch Linux because of this horrible idea of FORCED drop shadows. It ruins the whole user experience of otherwise good Brave browser. Please, developers, provide users a way to disable the drop shadows completely!!!
If you insist on forcing stupid 'effects' like this on users, I'm afraid that I'll need to abandon Brave for good!
Remember: Windows 11 uses drop shadows by default, but they can be disabled; gtk4 uses drop shadows, but they can be disabled, too. Why are you forcing un-disableable drop shadows on people?
I'm still stuck with brave-1.66 on Arch Linux because of this horrible idea of FORCED drop shadows. It ruins the whole user experience of otherwise good Brave browser. Please, developers, provide users a way to disable the drop shadows completely!!!
If you insist on forcing stupid 'effects' like this on users, I'm afraid that I'll need to abandon Brave for good!
Remember: Windows 11 uses drop shadows by default, but they can be disabled; gtk4 uses drop shadows, but they can be disabled, too. Why are you forcing un-disableable drop shadows on people?
Feel you!
Something must have happened along the way because I have installed brave-nightly today and the problem is not there :smiley: Is it only me (i have recompiled libgtk4 for my ubuntu with the patch provided here ) or the menus have been fixed?
I don't know if we've done anything on our end @pemazzon but glad its working for you! Could you share some steps for other people in the thread?
Hi @fallaciousreasoning The only thing I know is that me and other were holding back at version 1.66 because version 1.67 have this issue (just re-downloaded to check and it's there). Today I have tried both brave-nightly (zip file) and brave-stable (apt update) and version 1.69 (stable) or the nightly version don't show the problem. The menus simply don't have rounded corners nor shadows anymore, so I advice everyone to just try to update. It's also true that both the computers I have installed the two versions have my patched gtk4 library but I don't think this is what fixed this... I just rebuilt the library to fix the same problem on other apps.
Another thing I just came across was the brave://flags/#brave-web-view-rounded-corners flag, which you might be able to toggle on/off. Not sure it'll help but might be worth trying.
@pemazzon Yeah, you're right! It seems to be ~fixed~ reverted back to original in 1.69
Okay, thanks for all the input everyone - my theory is that this was something that changed in upstream Chromium. Glad its working for you all again :smile: