159402 - Find in this page dialogue obscures result.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect)

Description

[Jason Bassford]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020724
BuildID:    2002072408

Sometimes when doing a text search on a Web page, the Find dialogue box will
obscure the text that's found.  It appears as if nothing happens after clicking
"Find", but it HAS found something, it's just that it's hidden behind the
dialogue box.  The user then has to realise what's happend and manually move the
box out of the way.  This is something that Mozilla should do automatically.

If the page is scrollable, then I'm hoping that the fix for bug 78833 comment 15
will correct this behaviour (so that the found text is scrolled to a point
either above or below the Find dialogue box).  Currently, even on a scrollable
page, the scrolling improperly positions the text beneath the Find dialogue box.  

However, I consider this a separate bug since if the page is NOT scrollable,
then the box itself should be moved out of the way should it happen to be in the
way.  (This may not be a very common problem but it's certainly possible.)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to a Web page that is not scrollable.
2. Locate the first occurrence of a word on that page.
3. Ctrl-F and move the Find dialogue box *on top of* the word so that it's now
hidden.
4. Type the word into the "Find text" field and click on Find.

Actual Results:  Although the found text is highlighted, there's no way you can
tell that this is the case since it's hidden behind the dialogue box.  You have
to manually move the box out of the way to see the result.

Expected Results:  The Find dialogue box should automatically move out of the
way of the found highlighted text so that you can see it.

Comment 1

[Jason Bassford]

Also see bug 87944 for instances of this problem with pages that are scrollable.

Comment 2

[Jason Bassford]

Note: It may be thought pretty stupid to address a situation in which somebody's
already seen the content of a page and is searching for text that was right in
front of them all along, however I can think of another circumstance in which
this would happen and which would not be quite so "stupid".

One of my browsing habits is to do a Google search and then open up a series of
resulting sites in new tabs.  I also then open the Find dialogue and enter the
text I'm searching for.  As I go from one tab to another, the Find dialogue
remains on top so all I do is click the next tab and the Find button again. 
It's perfectly possible that I'll come to a (non-scrollable) page containing the
text I'm looking for, but that I won't know this since it's ALREADY obscured by
the "on top" Find dialog box.

Fixing this particular bug could also be an interim fix for those bugs dealing
with scrollable Web pages.  Even if the scrolling is not behaving as it
"should", at the very least the result would never be obscured.

Comment 3

[sfelshin]

On the other hand, if the "Find in this Page" window was a real dialog box,
instead of a bizarre half-dialog, half-window, then it would be dismissed on
Find and wouldn't obscure anything.  See bug 60618.

Comment 4

[Jason Bassford]

Personally, I don't care what it is so long as it doesn't disappear when I click
OK (I suppose that means that I'd like it to be window).  I enjoy the
functionality of having the dialog/window remain onscreen so that I can keep
clicking on Find and have it find repeated instances, or change the search
string and find something else.  It's easier than having to keep calling it up
every time I want to search for the same thing (I know I could use find again
here - but find again doesn't have the extra functionality of doing more than
just a forward search that the find dialog / window does when you have "wrap
around" or "search backward" checked) or something different.

Comment 5

[Jason Bassford]

> so long as it doesn't disappear when I click OK

I meant when I click "Find"...

Comment 6

[Robert T. Drury]

The find dialog obscuring text bugs me too.  How about a micro-sized find UI up
in the toolbar?  Make it a selectable preference to satisfy those who like the
floating dialog.

Relating to comment #2 - seemms like popping up those tabs and using find on all
of them is commonly done so why not have a special ctr-shft-F to popup find
dialog with Gogle search criteria?  Can you do that?

I'd REALLY like to see this little enhancement (I added it to Gedit and was
happy I did):  during find when you jump to the next instance of the find text
in the text window have the vertical scroll bar center the window on the found
instance.  It's useful to see full context above and below it.

Comment 7

[Andrew Schultz]

*** Bug 320764 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter "spam" on "guifeatures-nobody-20080610".

Comment 9

[Jason Bassford]

This has been fixed in recent nightly builds. The find dialog is no longer a floating window, but a dialog box. (I don't know what bug introduced this though new feature though.) As the original reporter, I'm closing this bug.