974389 - Panels should orient towards the center of the window

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Attachment: Old Nightly bookmarks menu

When the bookmarks button is on the left side of the Firefox window, the bookmark menu now folds open outside and to the left of the Firefox window. This looks really awkward, see screenshot nr 1. This behavior changed between the Nightly of 12 February and now.

What's more, even if you keep the bookmarks menu in the default place, the behavior doesn't help anything: it will still cause the submenus to fold out to the left, despite the foldout buttons being right. i.e. if this restyle was to make more room to the right, it did not achieve it's purpose and that room is wasted.

Comment 1

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Attachment: New style menu folds to outside window.

It looks even worse with more bookmarks.

Comment 2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Attachment: Default placement still opens to the left instead of right.

Comment 3

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

We do seem to do the right thing if the window is positioned such that folding out to the left would cause us to run off-screen. In that case the behavior reverts to the old style.

But folding menus outside of the main window is really really strange in Windows. I can't find any other application that does this. This includes Firefox itself: if you position it on the left side of the screen, the hamburger menu doesn't suddenly start folding out to the right!

Comment 4

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

>This includes Firefox itself: if you position it on the left side of the screen, the hamburger menu doesn't suddenly start folding out to the right!

To my shock and amazement, Firefox indeed doesn't, but Thunderbird *does*.

Comment 5

[u428464]

It's the default behaviour for panels. The bookmarks panel previous behaviour was inconsistent and it got corrected.

Comment 6

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

How was it inconsistent? As far as I can tell, the panel behavior *now* is different between the main menu and the bookmarks menu.

Comment 7

[u428464]

All widgets panels (History, Downloads, star panel, etc.) are oriented to the left unless the edge of the screen push them. Submenus open if possible to the right.

Comment 8

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Would orienting to the center of the application window not make more sense? Note that this is what you get if the user doesn't customize the layout, because the default settings put everything right of center.

Comment 9

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto (:gcp) from comment #8)
> Would orienting to the center of the application window not make more sense?
> Note that this is what you get if the user doesn't customize the layout,
> because the default settings put everything right of center.

Yes, panels should orient themselves towards the center of the window.

Comment 10

[u428464]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto (:gcp) from comment #8)
> Would orienting to the center of the application window not make more sense?
> Note that this is what you get if the user doesn't customize the layout,
> because the default settings put everything right of center.

Yeah I think that would be nice but I don't think it can be done in a near future.

Comment 11

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Renaming bug given that we agree what the root problem is here.

Comment 12

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Hmm, panel |position| options don't currently support "towards the window center", so moving widgets to the far-left can trigger this. A bit of a pre-existing problem (download panel, pre-Australis), it gets a bit worse because we have extra panel widgets now, and are generally prompting customization. Still, you often need the window a fair distance from the left side of the screen to give them space to show there.

Enn, is this something that might be straightforward to fix?

Comment 13

[Neil Deakin]

Quite simple to add an extra position flag to do this.

Comment 14

[Neil Deakin]

Attachment: Patch

This patch adds an 'inward' flag to make the panel open towards the middle of the screen. Some minor polish is still to be done as well as tests.

Comment 15

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Wouldn't this flag mean that if you drag the window to the right of the screen's center, the menu would still open to the left?

Comment 17

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #15)
> Wouldn't this flag mean that if you drag the window to the right of the
> screen's center, the menu would still open to the left?

(hrm, it looks like the code does open to the center of the window, instead of the center of the screen - nevermind me!)

Comment 20

[Underpass]

Excuse me, is there any change to have this bug solved? This problem is particularly nasty for left-handed people like me - I put the Bookmark button on the far left and its menu opens to the left.
Firefox is less usable due to this bug.

Comment 21

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Neil, did you forget to request review on this patch?

Comment 22

[Neil Deakin]

No, I believe it didn't work correctly in all cases. The logic in nsMenuPopupFrame::AdjustPositionForAnchorAlign is wrong.

Comment 23

[Neil Deakin]

I'm not working on this right now. The patch isn't quite correct as described in the previous comment.

Comment 25

[Underpass]

Sorry if I update this bug report but after 6 years the problem has not been solved.
Can you please take charge of this bug? Left-handed people like me would be very grateful. I think this is also an accessibility problem.

Thanks.

Comment 26

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 4 duplicates.
:mossop, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 27

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.

Comment 28

[Underpass]

Hello, is there any hope that anyone can solve this bug?