Metamask-extension: Confirmation popup not always opening

[danfinlay]

I don't have solid reproduction steps here, but I've now experienced this, and had users report it, too.

Sometimes, MetaMask seems to not open the confirmation popup, and so users are forced to click the fox to get to it. We should ensure that the popup is reliable.

@woodydeck on Gitter said it never pops up for them in Brave, but tends to work in Chrome intermittently.

[deamme]

Just happened to me while testing the Aragon 0.5 release. This did happen in Chrome for me.

[danfinlay]

If anyone has this happen to them, please only comment if you're able to provide some original info that helps us track it down.

In particular, if you open the logs (maybe the background logs), we would be looking for some red error text:
https://metamask.helpscoutdocs.com/article/21-how-to-get-logs-and-help-metamask-support-and-diagnose-your-issue

[woodydeck]

I can confirm the behavior again on Debian Chromium as well after testing. I will look at the logs now when testing in the future.

Another guess is that multiple pending transactions without confirmations puts it into this state for the future. We were testing a contract creation wizard, and hammering the submit button seems to bork things, but I haven't been able to replicate on command the behavior with certainty.

[danfinlay]

It's worth noting that in our very last release (the same timeframe people have started reporting this), there was a change to our popup opening logic:

https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/pull/3513

If the problem was related to that code, there may not be any error logs to find, we would have to just figure out what conditions it isn't meeting.

[Jay-Smoke]

Getting same error. Here is the background log. Hope this helps:

https://pastebin.com/vX0DVm9V

[1blockologist]

An issue for us because we just launched a product that relies on web3 wallet signing, and many of our confused users (who have never used address signing) are more confused because metamask is broken, because our instructions won't include a 5 day old issue about explicitly clicking the fox.

(some of our users use other address signing apps, but metamask is most common desktop browser extension)

[1blockologist]

@danfinlay yeah maybe lets roll back #3513

[kumavis]

@danfinlay please add to next sprint

[darioAnongba]

Same issue here on Windows 10, Chrome version 65.0.3325.181

PS: I am using Metamask Beta

[mandys]

is there an update on this ?

[danfinlay]

Yeah, sorry, after shipping a few bugs we stepped back a bit and did some project maintenance. This is one of our top priorities at the moment, should be fixed very soon.

[roschler]

I'm having this problem too with the latest release, version 4.93. Metamask seems to enter a mode where it queues transactions instead of popping up. I think a food feature would be ability to turn transaction queueing off completely for some dApps (i.e. - requested by dApp when making the triggering Web3 transaction).

This comment has been copied from this duplicate issue:

https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/issues/4006

[cavepainting]

Seems like this issue still occurs intermittently on chrome where metamask seems to queue transactions and does not pop up. user has to manually click extension.

[owocki]

FWIW, this seems to have been happening to me a lot this past week.

[owocki]

Is there a way to programmatically know if the popout window was blocked? In this scenario, I would like to provide the user some prompt to check the fox in the top right so they do not sit there wondering where their metamask window is!