1793038 - Toolbar customization and menus don't work correctly with touch

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect, P3)

Description

[Ellie]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:106.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/106.0

Steps to reproduce:

The toolbar customization and menus don't work correctly with touch, making a lot of advanced Firefox functionality unavailable or a huge pain on touch devices.

Among the many problems are:

1. A long finger press the empty space to the right of the tabs on the tab bar does nothing. It should bring up the menu that offers "Customize toolbar...". This makes customization entirely unusable/unreachable for all those not figuring out it's also reachable through the overflow menu, I haven't found another spot to still open it.

2. In the customize view, a finger press & drag on any toolbar item will either do nothing or bring up the context menu as if I had long pressed but NOT dragged. This makes rearranging items downright impossible, you can just move them in/out of the overflow menu or get them out of the toolbar entirely but you're otherwise just stuck forever with the order.

3. When putting "Synced tabs" into the overflow menu (the button to get there, I mean), and then opening the overflow menu and tapping the "Synced tabs" entry, the resulting listing of open synced tabs is not scrollable with the finger if it is cut off on the screen due to the many open tab entries. This means the menu is mostly unusable since I can't actually see let alone open most of the listed synced tabs.

It would be great if this all worked better.

Actual results:

Lots of things not reacting right to finger drag to move and finger drag to scroll, making a lot of functionality unavailable.

Expected results:

Works as described

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Toolbars and Customization' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

(In reply to Ellie from comment #0)

1. A long finger press the empty space to the right of the tabs on the tab bar does nothing. It should bring up the menu that offers "Customize toolbar...". This makes customization entirely unusable/unreachable for all those not figuring out it's also reachable through the overflow menu, I haven't found another spot to still open it.

I believe we have bug 1674676 on file for this.

2. In the customize view, a finger press & drag on any toolbar item will either do nothing or bring up the context menu as if I had long pressed but NOT dragged. This makes rearranging items downright impossible, you can just move them in/out of the overflow menu or get them out of the toolbar entirely but you're otherwise just stuck forever with the order.

This likely needs support for touch-dragging at the platform (browser engine) layer (this is tracked in bug 1780181), followed by front-end changes to make use of this in the customize view.

Comment 3

[Ellie]

Huh, fascinating that bug 1674676 seems to suggest that only happens on Windows and not on Linux. That's not the case for me, I tested this on Linux, both Fedora Linux 26 on an x86 laptop with touch screen in a GNOME 3 Wayland session, and on an ARM64 PinePhone with Phosh Wayland session. It's broken on both. I don't have a Windows machine to test it there. Or am I actually seeing something else than that bug?

Comment 4

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Hi, We were able to reproduce some of the issues mentioned in the description on an Ubuntu 22 device with Touch as well as a Windows machine:

1. A long finger press the empty space to the right of the tabs on the tab bar does nothing. It should bring up the menu that offers "Customize toolbar...". This makes customization entirely unusable/unreachable for all those not figuring out it's also reachable through the overflow menu, I haven't found another spot to still open it.

2. In the customize view, a finger press & drag on any toolbar item will either do nothing or bring up the context menu as if I had long pressed but NOT dragged. This makes rearranging items downright impossible, you can just move them in/out of the overflow menu or get them out of the toolbar entirely but you're otherwise just stuck forever with the order.

3. When putting "Synced tabs" into the overflow menu (the button to get there, I mean), and then opening the overflow menu and tapping the "Synced tabs" entry, the resulting listing of open synced tabs is not scrollable with the finger if it is cut off on the screen due to the many open tab entries. This means the menu is mostly unusable since I can't actually see let alone open most of the listed synced tabs.

The 1st and 3rd issue we were able to reproduce it on Ubuntu 22 but we do like to note that the scrollbar from the 3rd issue seems to work on our end.
We were also able to reproduce the 1st issue on a Windows machine with touch, but we couldnt reproduce the other two.

Comment 5

[Ellie]

For what it's worth, when I said scrolling the menu I meant touch scroll: like, put finger down on any point on the menu (which is NOT a designated scroll bar), then drag. That didn't work for me. As for scroll bar, if there even is one it's usually impractical for touch use.

Some of these things might also depend on whether Firefox on my affected device is running via X11/XWayland or as a native Wayland client, I guess. I don't know which one it's using.