1006270 - Search box is too wide if moved to tab strip, cannot be resized

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Zack Weinberg (:zwol)]

Attachment: Screen shot showing too-wide search box in tab strip

Partially to see what would happen and partially because I think it actually makes more sense there (not being an attribute of the current tab), I moved the search box to the tab strip.  It promptly expanded to fill all available space, squishing the tabs down to their minimum width.  (See attached screenshot.)

Better behavior would be for the search box to shrink to some minimum width when placed in the tab strip, but then be resizable by dragging whichever end of it is nearer to the free space.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (away/busy until Mar 10)]

(In reply to Zack Weinberg (:zwol) from comment #0)
> Created attachment 8417785 [details]
> Screen shot showing too-wide search box in tab strip
> 
> Partially to see what would happen and partially because I think it actually
> makes more sense there (not being an attribute of the current tab), I moved
> the search box to the tab strip.  It promptly expanded to fill all available
> space, squishing the tabs down to their minimum width.  (See attached
> screenshot.)

This we can fix easily by giving it a max-width when placed in the menubar or tabstrip.

> Better behavior would be for the search box to shrink to some minimum width
> when placed in the tab strip, but then be resizable by dragging whichever
> end of it is nearer to the free space.

This is more problematic. It's resizable in the navbar when next to the urlbar by means of a splitter. I don't know that/how/if we have a way to do something like that without having something else to resize it against (although I've never looked at the details of how it's implemented, so maybe it's not as hard as I think).

If we force it to be minimum width, however, I'm not sure if we then can get away with not having it resizable for people that depended on the previous behaviour. Different people seem to have different expectations here (see also e.g. bug 940169)