1439930 - about:preferences jumps around when entering stuff into the search box

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect, P1)

Description

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

STR:

Open about:preferences and search for something. Note that the scrollbar appears and disappears and the search box heavily jumps.

This seems to be a recent regression from bug 1426482. I'm not sure if it's only on Nightly or if it will spill over to Beta/Release anyway. In that case it would be good to have a tracking flag.

Osmose, can you take a look please?

Comment 1

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

(In reply to Johann Hofmann [:johannh] from comment #0)
> STR:
> 
> Open about:preferences and search for something. Note that the scrollbar
> appears and disappears and the search box heavily jumps.

I can replicate this behavior, but I think the scrollbar appearing and disappearing is expected, given that the height of the page due to matching search results is changing. Unless you mean something more obviously broken than that?

The width changing is probably not right, though. I'll see if I can track down the cause.

Comment 2

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

(In reply to Michael Kelly [:mkelly,:Osmose] from comment #1)
> (In reply to Johann Hofmann [:johannh] from comment #0)
> > STR:
> > 
> > Open about:preferences and search for something. Note that the scrollbar
> > appears and disappears and the search box heavily jumps.
> 
> I can replicate this behavior, but I think the scrollbar appearing and
> disappearing is expected, given that the height of the page due to matching
> search results is changing. Unless you mean something more obviously broken
> than that?

Yeah, sorry, I initially thought the width changed because of the searchbar, but you're right, it appears and disappears in other builds, too.

> The width changing is probably not right, though. I'll see if I can track
> down the cause.

Thank you :)

Comment 3

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

Looks like the cause is the length of the text in the new pref checkbox we added; it causes the parent containers to stretch beyond their normal width when it is present. I can replicate with the commit before bug 1426482 by making the crash report label (alwaysSubmitCrashReports1.label) really long. 

I don't know a whole lot about XUL but I imagine the page should be flexible to long lines of text and wrap them. 

I can try to come up with a fix but it'll be slow going given my current level of XUL knowledge.

Comment 4

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

Okay, I'll have something for this soon.

Comment 5

[Phabricator Automation]

Attachment: Bug 1439930 Wrap long pref checkbox labels in Privacy prefs.

Comment 6

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

Attachment: Bug 1439930 Wrap long pref checkbox labels in Privacy prefs.

Without any flex, the checkboxes in the Privacy section of about:preferences
refused to wrap their text and caused the page width to expand to accommodate
them, which made the search box and other elements move around while performing
searches as the page width changed.

Adding flex means the checkbox wraps text to the next line when the label is
longer than the width can accommodate.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/223256/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/223256/

Comment 7

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

Comment on attachment 8954109 [details]
Bug 1439930 Wrap long pref checkbox labels in Privacy prefs.

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/223256/#review229654

Comment 8

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/539f995aea77
Wrap long pref checkbox labels in Privacy prefs. r=jaws

Comment 9

[Noemi Erli[:noemi_erli]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/539f995aea77

Comment 10

[Oana Botisan, Desktop QA]

Attachment: preferences search bar.gif

I managed to reproduce the issue on Ubuntu 16.04 x64 using an older version of Nightly 2018-02-21.

I retested everything on latest Nightly 61.0a1 and beta 60.0b6 using Windows 10 x64, Ubuntu 16.04 x64 and macOS 10.13 and I noticed a few things:
 - the search bar is not jumping anymore (this issue I could reproduce only on Ubuntu)
 - the scrollbar is still changing length randomly (it doesn't appear and disappear)
 - also, when the text is deleted (using "Backspace") the page is glitching. This doesn't happen so bad when the text is being written. In this situation the transition is made smoothly, only when the text is deleted the page glitches. Please look at the attached gif to see what I am referring to.
 
Is this normal behaviour or is it a known issue?

Comment 11

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

jaws is a better person to answer this, I don't really know what's expected for the preferences. I agree with you that they could be normal behavior or things we want to polish and make smoother though.

I think the width of the page and the searchbox moving horizontally were regressions from bug 1426482, and the rest seem unrelated.

Comment 12

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

Oana, can you please retest with a new Nightly build? The scrollbar changing length and the page flickering (glitching) shouldn't happen now that bug 1446657 is fixed.

Comment 13

[Oana Botisan, Desktop QA]

I verified everything with the latest Nightly (2018-03-25) on Windows 10 x64, Ubuntu 16.04 and macOS 10.12 and I still get the page flickering when the text is being deleted and the scrollbar is changing length.

Comment 14

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Oana Botisan from comment #13)
> I verified everything with the latest Nightly (2018-03-25) on Windows 10
> x64, Ubuntu 16.04 and macOS 10.12 and I still get the page flickering when
> the text is being deleted and the scrollbar is changing length.

Bouncing ni for this.

Comment 15

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

Filed bug 1449658 for the follow-up patch.

Comment 16

[Oana Botisan, Desktop QA]

I verified the fix again using latest Nightly 63.0a1 and beta 62.0b7 on Windows 10 x64, Ubuntu 16.04 x64 and Mac OS 10.11. The bug is not reproducing anymore.