1159233 - In-content preferences: some subdialogs are cut off in a small window (about 500px high)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Camelia Badau [:cbadau], Desktop Test Engineering]

Attachment: ChangeMasterPassword.png

This bug was filled based on the discussion from bug 1128237 comment 14.

Reproducible on Firefox 38 Beta 8 (BuildID: 20150427090451)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0

There are 2 situations: 

1. Make the window smaller (about 500px high) -> open one subdialog (e.g: Security tab -> Change Master Password) => the subdialog is cut off and the buttons aren't visible; no horizontal/vertical scrollbar displayed (see attachment "ChangeMasterPassword.png")

2. Launch Firefox -> Open about:preferences -> Open one subdialog (e.g: Privacy tab -> Cookies) -> make the window smaller (about 500px high) => the subdialog is cut off and no horizontal/vertical scrollbar is displayed (see attachment "Cookies.png")

Note: The bug is reproducible also on Ubuntu 13.10 32bit and Mac OSX 10.9.5.

Comment 1

[Camelia Badau [:cbadau], Desktop Test Engineering]

Attachment: Cookies.png

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Marco, I added this to the spreadsheet, but I probably won't have time this iteration - I'd like to add it for the next (41.1, I guess) - can you make sure it doesn't get lost if/when/as you update the spreadsheet?

Comment 3

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #2)
> Marco, I added this to the spreadsheet, but I probably won't have time this
> iteration - I'd like to add it for the next (41.1, I guess) - can you make
> sure it doesn't get lost if/when/as you update the spreadsheet?

No problem, it's been added for whenever you are ready.  Thanks

Comment 4

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

The proxy dialog has the same issue:
https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/UVL2gNF5/nightly-proxy-settings.png

Comment 6

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

I would prefer that we make the body of the box vertically flex, keeping the header and footer always visible and showing a scrollbar in the body of the dialog.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #6)
> I would prefer that we make the body of the box vertically flex, keeping the
> header and footer always visible and showing a scrollbar in the body of the
> dialog.

We already do that (well, did, before the recent regression detailed in bug 1429544), but in some cases (e.g. the cookies list) this doesn't seem to be sufficient. It's not clear to me why, off-hand.

Comment 8

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I wonder if a solution here is to use something like the Container Tabs interface to display the preferences that we currently display in subdialogs.  That interface can be scrolled using the page's scrollbar, and it seems to support very short windows, requiring only enough height for the browser chrome and the about:preferences searchbar in addition to the preferences interface itself.

It doesn't appear to support canceling changes the way you can do in a subdialog, but perhaps that can be added.  And reusing that interface would improve consistency between these secondary interfaces.  (I was quite surprised the first time I pressed the Settings… button next to the "Enable Container Tabs" checkbox and discovered that the interface did not open in a subdialog, as I expected it to behave similarly to the Network Proxy "Settings…" button.)