1223020 - Bad submenu positioning. Caused by gtk3?

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 789417

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Tony Houghton]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2552.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Opened the main menu using the button with 3 bars and browsed through the submenus. I'm actually using Icedove (experimental version) from Debian.


Actual results:

There isn't room for the submenus to open on the right as usual, so they open on the left instead. At best I believe this is poor UX. Additionally, sometimes they open under the pointer instead of to the left, adding to the general mess and confusion, and making the other items in the parent menu difficult to access. This is probably a side effect of the (otherwise very welcome) upgrade to GDK3.


Expected results:

More consistent positioning of the submenus. I realise you're probably at the mercy of some GTK3 bug, but I think submenus on the right edge of the screen are difficult to deal with in any desktop/toolkit, so surely it would be better to rearrange the UI with the menu button on the left (maybe depending on locale if right-left languages also swap the submenu direction)? This applies to Firefox too.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Are any of http://mzl.la/1NENtMl applicable to what you are reporting?

(perhaps karlt will be familiar with this issue)

Comment 2

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

(In reply to Tony Houghton from comment #0)
> Additionally,
> sometimes they open under the pointer instead of to the left,

This may be bug 1022241.

This is the GTK3-specific part of the report, I assume?

Comment 3

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Would this be related to bug 789417 which is not gtk3 special (but help to fix it would be really appreciated ;) ).

Comment 4

[Tony Houghton]

I don't think this is related to bug 1022241. Actually, I don't think "my" bug is applicable to Firefox after all, because its popup from the 3-bars button is quite different from Thunderbird's, being more like a dialog than a menu.

For me the problem isn't as severe as described in bug 789417, but they certainly look related. Perhaps that user has changed gtk-menu-popup-delay or equivalent. I've just asked on that bug.

I should also point out I'm using a hidpi (Retina) display, that quite often causes positioning problems, but I would expect slightly different symptoms if that were the case here. My menus are appearing at the correct Y-coordinate, with the X-coordinate aligning the right edge of the submenu with the inner border of the parent menu ie the latter's submenu arrows are not obscured. In the right column this only happens for Message Filters and Preferences. The remaining submenus from that column open on the left. In the left column the submenus for Print, Save As and Folders appear with their left edge aligned with the central separator of the parent menu. The others appear overlapping the parent column, similarly to what happens in the right column. It all seems deliberate, but not quite optimal.

That was difficult to describe, I think I need to make some sort of screencast.

Comment 5

[Tony Houghton]

Attachment: Screencast of menu positioning

The font scaling looks a bit weird in this because I had to disable the hidpi window scaling to get the screencast recorder to work properly.

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I saw exactly the same on Windows XP, and still on Windows 10, so it doesn't look gtk-specific, but like a duplicate of my bug 789417.