1801645 - Chat `Participants` panel does not shrink narrow enough for default width of right panel

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Instant Messaging, defect)

Description

[Jeff McKenna]

Attachment: right-panel-missing-scrollbars.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:107.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/107.0

Steps to reproduce:

• go to a channel with >20 participants

My environment: macOS on Thunderbird 102.5.0

Actual results:

• there is no scrollbar in the right panel (for Participants, and also for the Previous Conversations panel)
• unable to scroll through the participants (in this case, there are 72 participants in the channel)

Expected results:

• a scrollbar should appear, as happens for the Conversations panel on the left

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Thanks Jeff (reporter). Confirming based on screenshot of attachment 9304457 [details].
Martin, maybe an easy fix or good first bug for someone?

Jeff, does this also happen with ≡ > Help > Troubleshoot Mode…?

Comment 2

[Jeff McKenna]

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #1)

Jeff, does this also happen with ≡ > Help > Troubleshoot Mode…?

Interesting, both scrollbars appear properly in Troubleshoot Mode. I'm not familiar with that mode, what does this mean exactly that the issue doesn't appear there?

PS> all entries in my Help menu were greyed out, and I had to Google to find how to fix that issue - uncheck 'Use hardware acceleration when available'

thanks.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Jeff McKenna from comment #2)

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #1)

Jeff, does this also happen with ≡ > Help > Troubleshoot Mode…?

Interesting, both scrollbars appear properly in Troubleshoot Mode. I'm not familiar with that mode, what does this mean exactly that the issue doesn't appear there?

Thanks for rapid feedback! It means that your issue is caused by one of your add-ons or other customizations. See https://support.mozilla.org/kb/troubleshoot-mode-thunderbird

PS> all entries in my Help menu were greyed out, and I had to Google to find how to fix that issue - uncheck 'Use hardware acceleration when available'

That's on record as bug 1786988. Interesting - will try that trick!

Comment 4

[Jeff McKenna]

I was hoping we could discuss this more, before your quick change to "invalid".

In fact I have no installed add-ons or customizations (I just re-checked).

Any other things to check?

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Jeff McKenna from comment #4)

I was hoping we could discuss this more, before your quick change to "invalid".

:->

In fact I have no installed add-ons or customizations (I just re-checked).

Did you have a look at Troubleshoot Mode Thunderbird?
There's a number of things which are disabled in TSM (in the article, there's links on each item with more info):

- Add-ons (extensions and themes)
- Hardware acceleration
- Window and sidebar size and position settings (described in terms of Firefox)
- userChrome and userContent customizations
- JavaScript Just-in-time (JIT) compiler 

Any other things to check?

Not sure. Anything from the list above.

Comment 6

[Jeff McKenna]

Thank-you. I hope that someday Thunderbird out-of-the-box is able to support scrollbars in the right panel.

Closing ticket.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Jeff McKenna from comment #6)

Thank-you. I hope that someday Thunderbird out-of-the-box is able to support scrollbars in the right panel.

Sorry Jeff, I think there may still be a misunderstanding on your side.
You said: You are seeing scrollbars correctly if you run Thunderbird in Troubleshoot Mode.
Typically this does mean that Thunderbird (out-of-the-box) supports scrollbars in the right panel, but there's something in your personal setup/configuration of Thunderbird which interferes with the default scrollbars.

Have you tried unchecking ≡ > Settings > General > [ ] Use hardware acceleration when available?

Comment 8

[Jeff McKenna]

Sorry for not being clear: I meant to say that I hope someday that Thunderbird displays scrollbars in the right panel of the Chat interface, out-of-the-box (I use that term for the case where someone installs Thunderbird and does not install any extensions or make any customizations, or even has to use the Troubleshoot Mode for them to appear - users will never know of such a mode). That is my wish.

Let's all move on now. The ticket is marked as invalid, and there's nothing more to say :) I do appreciate that this is invalid, as developers can use a mode for scrollbars to appear - but unfortunately the average user will not.

Anyway, I am sure this is an old debate here. It's all ok :)

Have a good remaining of your week.

-jeff

Comment 9

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

The scrollbar is there, the lists are just not overflowing correctly/the splitters are too narrow. If you expand them to the left, the scrollbar should show up.

It seems this has been an issue for over a year and probably caused to the richlistbox for participants not shrinking narrow enough. For me it appears to want to be at least 330px wide.

Comment 10

[Jeff McKenna]

Confirmed Martin, you're right that the default right panel is too narrow, and manually widening them makes the scrollbars appear. Great find!

Comment 11

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

Attachment: Bug 1801645 - Fix overflow in chat conversation sidebar hiding scrollbar. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Adding a shared class instead of duplicated element ID for the conversation sidebar header labels.

Comment 12

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Thanks Martin (:freaktechnik), good catch!
So troubleshoot mode didn't have the issue because it just returned to the default width which happened to be wide enough?

Comment 13

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #12)

Thanks Martin (:freaktechnik), good catch!
So troubleshoot mode didn't have the issue because it just returned to the default width which happened to be wide enough?

I'm sorry, I don't think it's time well spent trying to find out why it behaved differently in troubleshooting mode. There's many sizing things that could've changed that just happened to fix it, or maybe the layout works slightly different there etc. In the end the relevant thing to know is that there always was a scrollbar, it just wasn't drawn where it is visible.

The only non-devtools indicator there was that the scrollbar could be off-screen is that you didn't see ellipsis at the end of usernames that were wider/longer than what could be displayed in the participants list.

The way to know this for sure with the developer tools is to inspect the participants list. When doing so, the first thing you should notice is that you can't see the right border of the highlighting and that the width it displays is wider than the width of properly constrained elements. Further, at the very end of the richlistbox there are two scrollbar elements, indicating that it has a horizontal and a vertical scrollbar that it can display when needed.

Comment 14

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/73d013c2afeb
Fix overflow in chat conversation sidebar hiding scrollbar. r=aleca

Comment 15

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

Comment on attachment 9305641 [details]
Bug 1801645 - Fix overflow in chat conversation sidebar hiding scrollbar. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Uplift note: the child revision is not needed on 108.

[Approval Request Comment]
Regression caused by (bug #): Unknown
User impact if declined: Vertical scrollbars in the participants list and past conversations list not visible out of the box
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): Tested on c-c, no automated tests.
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): Low risk, small style changes.

Comment 16

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Martin Giger [:freaktechnik] from comment #13)

[snip]
The only non-devtools indicator there was that the scrollbar could be off-screen is that you didn't see ellipsis at the end of usernames that were wider/longer than what could be displayed in the participants list.
The way to know this for sure with the developer tools is to inspect the participants list.

That's helpful information, thanks!

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9305641 [details]
Bug 1801645 - Fix overflow in chat conversation sidebar hiding scrollbar. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

[Triage Comment]
Approved for beta

Comment 18

[Daniel Darnell [:dandarnell]]

Thunderbird 108.0b3:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/222353a396c9

Comment 19

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

Comment on attachment 9305641 [details]
Bug 1801645 - Fix overflow in chat conversation sidebar hiding scrollbar. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Uplift note: the child revision is not needed for ESR 102.

[Approval Request Comment]
Regression caused by (bug #): Unknown
User impact if declined: Vertical scrollbars in the participants list and past conversations list not visible out of the box
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): Tested on c-c, c-b (as recent as 109.0b3), no automated tests.
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): Low risk, small style changes.

Comment 20

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9305641 [details]
Bug 1801645 - Fix overflow in chat conversation sidebar hiding scrollbar. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

[Triage Comment]
Approved for esr102

Comment 21

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 102.7.0:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr102/rev/a9c89d0023d1