112400 - Scroll bars appear at right/bottom of window instead of left/top

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Christopher Allen]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120
BuildID:    2001112012

When a page is too large to fit in the Mozilla window, Mozilla puts scroll bars
at the right-hand side or bottom of the window.  This is illogical, confusing,
and inconvenient: scroll bars should be drawn at the left hand side or top of
the window, as appropriate.  For examples, see Xaw, emacs, etc.

This applies to scrolling text areas, dialog boxes, etc.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to any long or wide page, for example,
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html

2. Observe improper placement of scroll bars

3. Resize window to be slightly smaller if scroll bars do not initially appear.


(O.K., I can't see this being made the default.  But really, it's *so* annoying
that there ought to be an option to fix it.)

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

wontfix ?
Right-bottom is correct for me and it's not confusing.

Comment 2

[Damian Yerrick]

Emacs on X11 and other Athena apps put the scroll bars at the left and top
and use the following button bindings:
  left -> move view one screen down
  middle -> move thumb
  right -> move view one screen up

Emacs on Win32 and most other Windows and Macintosh apps and apps that use
Qt or Gtk+ put the scroll bars at the right and bottom and use the following
button bindings:
  left in up-arrow -> move view one line up
  left above thumb -> move view one screen up
  left in thumb -> move thumb
  left below thumb -> move view one screen down
  left in down-arrow -> move view one line down
  middle -> nop
  right -> nop

I made a suggestion in comment 66 to bug 4302 of treating platform-specific
UI behavior as a preference that defaults one way on one platform and another
way on other platforms.  Would it apply here too?

Comment 3

[Damian Yerrick]

oops...  bug 4302 comment 66

lack of docs + lack of preview = screwed up previous comment

Comment 4

[Christopher Allen]

Matthias:

Of course I understand your point of view, given that it's the conventional one,
but the fact of the matter is that I have a dozen windows open on my screen at
the moment, and Mozilla is the *only* one that has the scroll bars on the right.

Comment 5

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

I was about to blame this all on GTK and point out how all GTK apps have their
scroll bars on the right (most do). However, in the Gnome-terminal preferences
there is the option to put a scrollbar on the left. It seems odd to me that this
isn't some system wide configuration setting for GTK apps though. Since most GTK
apps don't have this option wouldn't it be better to moan to the GTK developers?

Comment 6

[Mike Young]

I've used applications with left/top scrolling, and although I've found them
bizarre and foreign, I have to admit that there are some people who like it that
way. 

This is a valid enhancement, but it should be noted that these people are only
on *nix and most likely have been since before Qt and GTK. The question whether
this should be up to the window manager / widget set is a valid one, and if we
want to pass the buck I guess we could, but its so much fun adding 8 million
extra preferences... (before Hixie yells at me, I'd like to note that I am being
sarcastic.)

Comment 7

[John Levon]

isn't this sort of part of the ancient bug 26828 (why is that one
still open ?)

Comment 8

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Mozilla on X uses GTK+, and follows the GTK+ default for the position of 
scrollbars, that is, the right and bottom. GTK+ cannot be configured globally 
to alter this: if it could, Mozilla wouldn't follow suit automatically, and 
that would be a bug, but it won't be a bug unless it ever happens.

gnome-terminal offers an option to put the scrollbar on the left because that's 
where xterm's scrollbar used to be and many people spent long hours using 
xterm. The same is not true for Mozilla, however, since few (if any) people 
ever spent long hours in a graphical Web browser which had the scrollbar on the 
left.

Mozilla has a Qt port in addition to its GTK+ version, and I suppose in theory 
there could be an Athena port too. If you maintain (or pay for or otherwise 
organize the maintenance of) an Athena port of Mozilla, and in that Athena port 
Mozilla's scrollbars still appear at the right/bottom, that will be a valid 
bug. This bug, however, isn't.