window placement broken in unity

[Razvan Cosma]

On a dual-monitor setup (Latitude e5410, Intel video card), new window positions and resize behaviour is erratic and makes interaction very difficult. Examples:
1. When a window opens on the smaller display (1440x900), it is sized to (I guess) fit in the other one (1600x1050). This means that every time I have to find a visible corner (or drag one into view with alt+click), set the cursor on it (difficult job with a touchpad, the cursor doesn't snap to edges as well as I'd like) and resize.
2. Window sizes and placement are not remembered on next launch. They fill an area fit for the size of the larger monitor, or snap to the left edge filling the height but only about 200px wide. They also open on a seemingly random monitor.
3. Maximizing a window doesn't always expand it to fill the screen, sometimes they just fill vertical space but are very narrow and aligned left (same as above)
4. Unmaximizing a window doesn't return to the initial size/position. They keep moving to the right and get a bit smaller, e.g a remote desktop window (Remmina) that fitted exactly before maximize will now extend into the other monitor and have scrollbars.
I have only one virtual desktop, stretching two monitors, default is the laptop's (set to the right), external on HDMI.

-----------------

Comment from design:

Thanks for this great bug report! ;-) As the bug report discusses four different bugs, I have broken this into four individual bugs, see:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/869900

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/869902

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/869906

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/869907

This bug is now marked invalid because the issues discussed here are each reported in their own bugs

[Razvan Cosma (rg-cosma)]

Attached a screenshot that shows how a window opens maximized vertically but being very narrow. It is the Firefox downloads dialog, and I keep trying to make it open in a small window as usual, no success. Also, the Firefox window is not maximized, but stretched as much as possible to fill the screen, because otherwise it might stick to the left side like the downloads, or jump to the other monitor.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[David Barth (dbarth)]

There are a lot of issues actually captured in this bug report.

Essentially it resolves around the interaction between applications in general, Mozilla ones in particular, and the Compiz window manager.

The feedback is valuable, but we can't address that for the time being and I will defer to O+1 and add it to the Design team's radar.

[David Barth (dbarth)]

Note: incomplete means that we essentially block waiting for design's input.