Bug: pop-up notifications in Chromium appear over i3lock screen

[alicewriteswrongs]

When screen is locked using i3lock new notifications from Chromium appear on the screen above i3lock and are readable by any passers-by.

This happens whenever Chromium is running, the screen is locked, and Chromium displays a pop-up notification.

Possible workarounds are just disabling Chromium notifications, but in my mind i3lock should be blocking stuff like this. I haven't done extensive testing to see if spawning other types of windows or window-like things (while the screen is locked) will result in similar behavior.

[Airblader]

Are you running a compositor?

[alicewriteswrongs]

Yes, I use compton (b/c I like shiny things). Could this be the source of the problem?

[Airblader]

Can you reproduce it without Compton?

[alicewriteswrongs]

No, if I kill compton the behavior doesn't happen. Any ideas on how to work around this? I'd like to keep drop shadows and notifications without leaking information to anyone who sees my locked screen.

[Airblader]

Sorry, but as stated in #8, we don't support any kind of compositing (though if you can come up with a PR, we certainly don't mind a fix for it), hence I'll close this issue.

I suggest you toy around with excluding any kind of compton effects on those popups and see if that changes something. Otherwise, try another lockscreen program. Also, if you do investigate this and can at least come up with the technical reason for why this happens, please don't hesitate sharing it with us – maybe a fix wouldn't be so hard.

[Airblader]

@aliceriot By the way, what are these popups? Is it actually Chromium displaying them or just causing them? Or is it some notification daemon? If you happen to be running dunst, it allows pausing / resuming the daemon which you can wrap around the i3lock call to fix this issue. Other daemons might have similar functionality.

[alicewriteswrongs]

The popups are the chromium notification engine, gmail and such can send notifications which look much like desktop notifications using the framework. Technical document about them here.

I'll definitely poke around at this! No promises on a PR though :D

Thanks for your help!

[Airblader]

If you just find out what the underlying problem is, without a PR, please share that too. Maybe we can figure something out then. :)

[Manouchehri]

I was having a similar issue with i3bar (via a modifier key trigger) showing on top of i3lock a few months ago. It's been fixed, not sure which commit though.

Those two might be related, hopefully it'll give a starting place to look.

[Airblader]

It's been fixed, not sure which commit though.

Run a git bisect to find out.

[Manouchehri]

Well yes, that would do it. I haven't ran across @aliceriot's issue with my setup yet, so I wasn't planning on fixing it; I was trying to give a bit of help. =)

[Airblader]

Finding out which commit "fixed" it would be helping, no need to come up with an actual fix (if it even exists) ;)

[Manouchehri]

Oh, I lied, I was able to trigger it again. compton still draws i3bar on top of i3lock. My bad, I thought it was fixed but I just disabled compton and forgot.

[sandsmark]

For reference, the solution seems to be to use xcb_composite_get_overlay_window() on the root window and using the result instead of just the root window for xcb_create_window() in open_fullscreen_window().

google/xsecurelock@ee1825a

[Stebalien]

A workaround is to set unredir-if-possible in compton.

[Cxarli]

For future readers: the solution provided above (unredir-if-possible) fixed this for me on Chromium/Chrome and Telegram Desktop notifications. However, by now compton has been renamed to picom so you'll have to edit ~/.config/picom/picom.conf

[ouuan]

There should be something about compton/picom in the issue title, e.g. "Bug: pop-up notifications over i3lock screen when using compton".

I ran into this issue because I was using the fork i3lock-color, and I was not using any compositor. I looked for the most upvoted comment in this issue and found #22 (comment). I thought it meant I need to use picom to solve this issue. After setting up picom, this issue still persists. Then I found that this is actually a bug that is only in i3lock-color (Raymo111#210), not in i3lock.

[kolayne]

I'm experiencing the same issue with Telegram Desktop notifications even when picom is disabled (not just killed, but the whole system is booted without starting picom)