129399 - Make bookmarks drop-down lists' max width dependent on font size or screen resolution

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[thinkerdreamer]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020204
BuildID:    2002020406

When you add a site with a long name the bookmark drop down menu is too wide. 
If you have sub sub directories all with long names in them the popup bookmark
menus popup in inconvenient places.  The result is the bookmark menu appears
messy and way to wide. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.add bookmarks with long names in them especially in sub and sub sub folders
2.click "bookmarks"
3.navigate to the sub sub directories

Actual Results:  The bookmark menu is too wide resulting in the popup bookmark
menus in sub sub directory folders to come up in inconvenient places.  

Expected Results:  I suggest cutting the character limit at least in half.

Comment 1

[thinkerdreamer]

Correction: What I expected to see was a skinny menu that I could navigate 
through easily.

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

Matthew: could you give an example URL that shows the problem you describe?
I dont have a problem with this: mozilla cuts the name and adds three dots
for longer names and it all fits on the screen nicely.
What is your screen resolution?  Maybe you could give a screenshot?

Comment 3

[Jason Fleshman]

There's no specific URL, although this page's title would be a good example. 
I'm attaching a screenshot since I see this too.  My resolution's set to
1152x864.  As the screenshot shows, Mozilla's about as far to the left as it can
get, and a sub-subfolder has to be drawn to the left of its parent instead of to
the right.  The selected menu item does get shortened a bit (you can see the
ellipsis), what I would like (and what I think the reporter would like) is for
the max-length of a bookmarks menu item to be shorter.

Comment 4

[Jason Fleshman]

Attachment: [Screenshot] Bookmarks menu taking up too much horiz space

Comment 5

[Jason Bassford]

WFM.  Build 2002030803 under XP.  Am unable to duplicate.

Comment 6

[Ben Guthrie]

Attachment: screen shot of bookmarks down to sub-sub-sub folders

the opening of the subfolders alternates right.left/right/left...  do you
consider these too wide?

Comment 7

[Neil Pilgrim]

On i386 linux 2002030607 I see this with one of my personal-toolbar bookmark
folders: it probably takes up about half the width of the (1024x768) screen!

A user-configurable upper-limit would be highly desirable :)

Comment 8

[Mark Bitterling]

I suppose this is related to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67595

On my Mac using the Classic Theme in 1024x768 res or higher (my typical
resolution setting), the bookmark widths look fine as they are.  

However, I checked it out the size in 640x480 and I would have to say that the
bookmark menus were a bit wide.  Of course EVERYTHING seemed way too big to me
in 640x480 res.

I am sure mpt is opposed to any new prefs as usual, but it is the first thing
that comes to my mind.  

Comment 9

[Dimitrios]

Mozilla bookmark list max width : 66+2 char on all resolutions !
IE 6 bookmark list max width : 51+2 char (1024x768), 39+2 char (800x600), 30+2
char (640x480)
NS4.x : I can't recall

In the above comparison (Win2K, build 2002031203) by "+2" I denoted the ".."
characters at the end of a truncated bookmark title. You can see that IE uses a
variable list width and imo we should also use that idea. I.e. read current
resolution on startup, then keep a constant maximum width / resolution ratio (IE
slightly decreases this ratio as resolution is lowered, this is also correct). 
Marking bug as new, updating summary from "The bookmark list is too wide if you
have long names" to "Make bookmarks drop-down list's maximum width depended on
screen resolution".

Comment 10

[Dimitrios]

sorry for the repeated attempts to update summary.

Comment 11

[Dimitrios]

FYI, NS4.7 was using 44+3 characters, regardless of the sceen resolution. This
smaller maximum width and the truncation in the middle (while Mozilla truncates
the last part of the bookmark name) was a slightly better solution for those
ancient ages of 640x480 and 800x600 pixels. Btw, this bug is cross-platform. A
discussion in mozillazine forum reasonably concluded that this is mostly a bug
than enhancement but I'm not changimg severity: it won't help since no one is
willing to fix it at this moment.

Comment 12

[Felix Miata]

Attachment: 800x600 resolution - Good Bookmarks (Netscape 4)

For the apparently overwhelming majority of developers who are unaware of what
common (low) screen resolutions look like. Mozilla bookmarks should look no
worse than this.

Comment 13

[Felix Miata]

Attachment: 800x600 screenshot - Shameful Mozilla bookmarks

Comment 14

[thinkerdreamer]

I changed the severity to normal since it is, in my opinion, a bug and not an RFE.
If it is changed again to a lower severity then please keep it a bug and not an
RFE. If it is an RFE it will NEVER get worked on.  This bug is a pain in the
kneck. It only benefits those with higher resolutions.  The common man still has
a Windows 98 PC with 800 by 600 resolution.  Read the news to verify this fact.  

Comment 15

[Alfred Kayser]

Workaround:

add the following to userChrome.css (in chrome directory of your profile):
.bookmark-item {
  max-width: 30em !important;
}

Comment 16

[alanjstr]

From momokatte on the forums:

userChrome entries
In Mozilla Suite, use this:
#BookmarksMenu menupopup { max-width: 30em; }

In Mozilla Firebird, use this:
#bookmarks-menu menupopup { max-width: 30em; }

These should be considered for the patch to the browsers.  Would this be
something that needs to go into modern.jar and classic.jar, or are they defined
elswhere?  If needed, I'll take QA.

Comment 17

[Felix Miata]

In Seamonkey I've been using since comment 15:

.bookmark-item {  max-width: 50ex !important; }

Comment 18

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Mass reassign of my non-Firefox bugs to [e-mail]

Comment 19

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

*** Bug 202624 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 20

[thinkerdreamer]

If you're ever going to fix this bug, I'd rather that the it wasn't set static
like 50em.  Rather make it dependant on screen resolution like the bug says. I
prefer 20em (like Internet Explorer) for low resolutions.  Higher resolutions
may need 50em.  Right now the bookmarks look like aesthetic trash on older PC's.
 Yes, there are still many Windows 98 PC's out there.  Some people like to save
money in a hard global economy.  That is why there is FREE software.     

Comment 21

[Dimitrios]

*** Bug 247844 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 22

[Dimitrios]

After duping a Firefox bug against it, I noticed that this bug is considered
obsolete for FF. I don't understand why. It still exists on both Mozilla and FF.
Wontfix might be a better resolution (I know this bug hasn't been resolved but
is is essentially considered as such).

Comment 23

[ocean]

I added the section:

.bookmark-item {
  max-width: 50em !important;
}

to my userChrome.css file.  However, I can't get any setting above 50em to 
register.  50 is as high as it's allowing me to go.  Is there any way I can 
override this?

Comment 24

[thinkerdreamer]

Yes, WONTFIX is a better solution.  It rather annoys me that the Mozilla
Foundation fixes security bugs in a decent amount of time, but doesn't really
care to fix a long standing 2+ year old bug that should have been done right in
the first place.  The old Netscape had decent drop down lists, IE does too, but
Mozilla's drop down lists still look like trash.  How hard is it to fix this
bug, when it can already be fixed in the Chrome?  You really don't expect the
common user to hack Chrome.CSS do you?  Is there really a valid reason why it
won't be fixed?  Is Ben Goodger the only one that fixes bugs and adds new
features?     

Comment 25

[alanjstr]

I don't see any patches attached.  If it's so trivial, go ahead and take care of
that.

Comment 26

[thinkerdreamer]

So are you saying that no Mozilla developer is good enough to patch this?  

Comment 27

[Felix Miata]

I'm pretty sure what was meant was that none are both willing and able.

It really doesn't need fixing according to the current summary. The better
determinant of max width is the font size, not the resolution. Incorporating a
Mozilla css rule similar to that in comment 17 would do the job described in the
original summary. That works perfectly for me, better than 4.x.

Comment 28

[thinkerdreamer]

I changed the summary.  Whenever developers get around to cleaning up the look
and feel of the UI please consider this bug.  This bug is not obsolete because
in the newer, higher, resolutions Mozilla's bookmarks are too narrow.  If you
made the bookmarks' drop down list scale down with lower resolutions and scale
up with higher resolutions then everyone would be satisfied. If you can scale by
font size then scale by font size. Most end users want, at the least, common
interface design in the bookmark menu comparable to IE and Opera.  Maybe around
Mozilla 4.0 this will be fixed after every other 2-3 year old bug is marked
"fixed."  By then, I will have showed my friends this bug many times and watch
them wonder why it was never fixed in earlier releases. :)    

Comment 29

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
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 30

[Jesse Ruderman]

Attachment: Firefox history menu screenshot (too narrow)

On a 13" MBP, the Firefox history menu seems unnecessarily narrow.  I can't read any of these bug summaries.

Comment 31

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

I don't see any issues with the current menu being too small (or too large for that matter). There are tooltips to read the full title, and we can't have the menu be so large that submenus start to get positioned awkwardly.

Comment 32

[Jesse Ruderman]

It's better now for me too.  The History menu is twice as wide as it was in comment 30.

I wonder if this improved due to Firefox changes, Mac OS X changes, or me getting a larger and higher-DPI screen.