53375 - Sizing of Preferences menu gives no hints on all options available.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, defect, P2)

Description

[Barry Marshall]

I've confirmed this behaviour on Win32 and OS/2, so I think this is pretty well 
cross-platform.

1) Start Mozilla.
2) Edit -> Preferences.
3) Resize the window.

If the window is too small to display all of the contents, there is no visual 
indication for the content on the right-hand side of the display to either 
scroll the window or to indicate that there are more options.

Contrast that with the tree view of the browser preferences.  As the window 
grows smaller, the scroll bar is created and adjusted for the amount of 
scrolling that is required to view all options.

I have a feeling that this is a little more fundamental in the way that XP 
is designed rather than a straight Chrome or Themes problem.

Pictures to follow...

Comment 1

[Barry Marshall]

Attachment: Starting with a fully maximized window...

Comment 2

[Barry Marshall]

Attachment: Crush it up a bit. Where did Toolbars go? How do I access it?

Comment 3

[Barry Marshall]

Attachment: Crush it even more. My left-hand window pane has a scroll bar, but now I can't access Home Page, nor would I even know that it existed if I hadn't made a huge window to start with.

Comment 4

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

confirming.

Comment 5

[Barry Marshall]

Nominating for RTM.

People are going to expect Netscape 6.0 to be relatively clean on the UI side.  
Maybe a simple compromise would be to fix the size of the window to avoid having 
this stuff not visible.

Comment 6

[don]

It's ugly but we can ship it.

Comment 7

[Barry Marshall (at work)]

Bug still exists in 1114.

Comment 8

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

nav triage team: p2 for nsbeta1. Ben: is this related to some other generic pref
sizing bug on your plate. 

Comment 9

[Barry Marshall]

Per Vishy's target change, nominate for 0.9.1.

Comment 10

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

--> mcafee

Comment 11

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

not a beta stopper. 

Comment 12

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

i'm confused. why has this been minused when the milestone's still at 0.9.1? in
any case, adding catfood kw. this has been an annoying, long-standing problem
that seems to affect many users.

Comment 13

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

marking future

Comment 14

[Barry Marshall]

Playing the "Nominate The Bug" game....  (sigh)

Per Paul's Target change, we'll remove the 0.9.1 nomination and go for 1.1 
now....

Comment 15

[Chris McAfee]

UE won't let us put a scrollbar in pref window.
Over to german to confirm.  Don't resize the pref
window to be that small?

Comment 16

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Yes, that's correct, the prefs panels should not have overall scrollbars. Ever. 
I don't know why that option is being seriously considered at all.

If you shouldn't resize the dialog to be that small, then why does it let you? 
Is this an XP Toolkit problem, that you can't specify a minimum size for the 
window?

Comment 17

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

nav triage; not a nsCatFood issue, this only seriously impacts users who resize 
the panel to be too small. not too many people would do that. 

Comment 18

[Chris McAfee]

per mpt's comments, marking this won't fix.
The real issue here is scrollbars in the pref window.

So far we've been distributing the content over enough
panels so that space isn't a problem with the default size.
Maybe we should open another bug about a minimum pref panel size?
What about people with smaller fonts?

Marking won't fix.

Comment 19

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

v

Comment 20

[benc]

Is this relnote still up-to-date? I couldn't resize the window in a situation
where it came up abnormally small:

"Preferences window initial size doesn't always give hints on all options
available. Resize the window from its lower right corner to see them all. (Bug
53375) "

Comment 21

[Rob]

Found a workaround if resizing doesn't work...in localstore.rdf go to

<RDF:Description about="chrome://communicator/content/pref/pref.xul#prefDialog"

Add in width and height parameters to heart's content, all fixed.

Comment 22

[Igor Pesando]

On XP with M1.2 and danish language.
Inserted as suggested from comment #21
   <RDF:Description about="chrome://communicator/content/pref/pref.xul#prefDialog">
    <screenX>4</screenX>
    <screenY>4</screenY>
    <width>800</width>
    <height>565</height>
  </RDF:Description>
without any effect
Bug has showed up after some time