115513 - not much space at start of text entry fields

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Editor, defect, P5)

Description

[Dave Nichols]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120
Build ID: 2001112009

I've noticed that I have to take slightly more care than 
I would expect to position the text caret 
at the beginning of text fields - using the mouse.
I suspected that this is due to Moz providing less white 
space at the start of a text field box than IE or NS4.
The following attachment shows the results of investigating 
this with Moz, IE6 and NS4.7 on Win98.

It seems that the space between the first character and 
the leftmost edge of the text box is greatest on NS4.7, 
then IE 6 and that Moz has least amount of space.

This is a common operation in using text fields (e.g. 
deciding to turn a search engine query into an exact phrase query, 
so needing to insert a " as the first character in the text field)

I predict that detailed usability studies would show it takes 
slightly longer to position the text cursor before the first character 
in Moz than in NS4.7 (larger area = shorter time)

Also should pixels of text be adjacent to the pixels of the box 
boundary - as is the case with the leftmost pixel of 't' and 'f' characters?

Proposal: add some more space before the first character of text boxes

Comment 1

[Dave Nichols]

Attachment: text field spacing in Moz, IE & NS4

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

-> URL Bar

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

sorry I suck -> back and confirming

Comment 4

[rods (gone)]

The URLBar isn't mine, sending to law maybe he knows who should own this.

Comment 5

[Dave Nichols]

Clarifying: this applies to all text fields, not just the URL Bar.
Text areas, like the Additional Comments box above, seem be slightly 
better - but maybe still need looking at.

Comment 6

[TucsonTester3]

Attachment: minimal testcase

Comment 7

[Bill Law]

Hoping this is an Editor:Core issue.

Comment 8

[Jens Stutte [:jstutte]]

Bulk-downgrade of unassigned, >=3 years untouched DOM/Storage bug's priority.

If you have reason to believe this is wrong, please write a comment and ni :jstutte.