100352 - Message box font should not be used for all dialogs

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: Themes, defect)

Description

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Mozilla uses the font that you have chosen for message boxes (Control Panel -->
Display Properties --> Appearance) in all of its dialogs. Bookmarks,
Preferences, everything. It shouldn't.

I have my message box font configured to be larger than the normal window font.
This makes Mozilla display *everything* in a large font. It should only use the
message box font for message boxes.

Comment 1

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

Mass reassigning my theme bugs to Shuehan.

Comment 2

[Jonas Jørgensen]

I was wrong when I said that "Mozilla uses the font that [...]". It is of course
the Modern and Classic themes that this problems lies in, not Mozilla itself.

Comment 3

[Jonas Jørgensen]

This is _really_ annoying. Nominating for 0.9.6.

Comment 4

[shliang]

buttons, bookmarks, sidebar tabs -> caption

text in Preferences will stay message-box

Comment 5

[Jonas Jørgensen]

> text in Preferences will stay message-box

No, no, no!!! Why should the preferences text be large just because the user 
wants message box text to be large? No other program has it this way!

Comment 6

[Jonas Jørgensen]

I'm gonna try to fix this myself. It'll be the first bug I've ever fixed - let's
see if I can do it...

Shuehan: You said that the text in preferences would stay message-box. Why?
Wouldn't it be okay if I made a patch that made everything caption except for
commonDialog?

Comment 7

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Attachment: changes message-box to caption for everything but commonDialog

Comment 8

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Wait - something very stranged just happened. Patch Maker seems to have put all
the contents of the files in the patch, instead of just the differences. I'll
attach a new patch instead.

Comment 9

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Attachment: better patch

Comment 10

[jag (Peter Annema)]

CC'ing Shuehan.

Shuehan, could you answer Jonas' question and perhaps review this patch? Looks
okay to me, but you're the expert here.

Comment 11

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Shuehan, could you please review my patch? Thank you.

Comment 12

[shliang]

sorry, i didn't see jag's comment from 10/31. i am getting to it, i need to ask
joe about something first before i can review the bug though.

Comment 13

[shliang]

going to test fonts - message-box and menu were the only ones used before
because they were the only ones that worked reliably on all platforms.

Comment 14

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

Jonas, keep in mind that the Modern skin is XP, meaning that the system fonts we
use there have to correspond to fonts that look good on Mac, Windows, and Linux.  

I can't approve your patch because the "caption" font on Macintoshes turns out
to be the same font as the "menu", which is the "Large System Font" in the
Appearance control panel.  On windows, I can't even find a way to change
"caption" from the Appearance control panel.

When we decided to use "message-box" in many places that were not actually
message boxes, we did this for compatibility with Mac, and nothing has changed
since then.  

So, I am going to have to mark this bug wontfix.

Comment 15

[Jonas Jørgensen]

This bug MUST be fixed, in one way or another. There are many people using 
Windows that have their message box font set to large or bold, and that makes 
Mozilla look very very ugly.

Reopening. 

Comment 16

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Attachment: Screenshot showing how terrible this looks

Comment 17

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

Jonas, if I were to check in your patch, it would cause the Modern skin to look
as puffy and bold on Macs as in your screen shot, because "caption" uses the
large menu font on Mac.

Comment 18

[Jonas Jørgensen]

I understand that, but if a patch is not good enough, the bug shouldn't be 
WONTFIXed - instead, a better patch should be made.

Or are you really trying to tell me that there is no way Mozilla can make sure 
that the correct font sizes are used on all platforms???

> Jonas, keep in mind that the Modern skin is XP, meaning that the system
> fonts we use there have to correspond to fonts that look good on Mac,
> Windows, and Linux.

That's exactly what this bug is about! The fonts that we use now does NOT always 
correspond to fonts that look good on Windows!

Comment 19

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Jonas, this bug is valid, and we should indeed be using `caption' in many places
(see also bug 81178). The fact that `message-box' is rendered as a small font on
Mac OS is a bug anyway.

However, a nearly-global change of `message-box' to `caption' won't work for the
reasons hewitt describes. You just need to be a bit more detailed. The address
field, Home button, Bookmarks menubutton, and prefs panels should be using the
`small-caption' font, while bookmarks in the Personal Toolbar should be using
the `icon' font.

Comment 20

[Jonas Jørgensen]

The icon font is the same as message-box on windows... can't I just use
small-caption for the personal toolbar bookmarks as well? What does it
correspond to on Mac?

Comment 21

[Jonas Jørgensen]

I just noticed that small-caption uses the same font-family as caption, but *the
same font-weight as message-box*!!! So it cannot be used on Windows either. That
sucks. What can we do?

Comment 22

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Please ignore my last two comments. They were completely wrong. Sorry. Mpt, you
are right about which fonts should be used where. The problem seems to be that
small-caption on Windows uses the Palette Title font, but that should be filed
as a different bug. I'm going to make a new patch for this bug, but it shouldn't
be checked in before the small-caption problem is fixed, since Palette Title is
bold by default.

Comment 23

[Jonas Jørgensen]

The small-caption problem is now bug 114029.

Comment 24

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

The CSS2 system fonts aren't really adequate.  Perhaps we need another -moz-...
value or two?

Comment 25

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Attachment: more mac-friendly patch

So, menulists becomes menu, the status bar becomes status-bar, search and go
buttons become caption, a lot of other stuff becomes small-caption. I didn't
make the personal toolbar bookmarks icon since it wouldn't look good with two
different fonts next to each other (small-caption for home & bookmark buttons,
icon for the bookmarks).

This will make Mozilla a much nicer looking Lizard when 114029 is fixed :-) !

Comment 26

[Jonas Jørgensen]

--> default assignee

Comment 27

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 28

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420