1824409 - Supernova: 3-pane view unwanted resize of split - should remember the split as a percentage, and not absolute

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect, P3)

Description

[quadronom]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0

Steps to reproduce:

The 3-pane view ("vertical layout") in Supernova has an unwanted behavior when you resize the Thunderbird window: It looks like the absolut size of the message pane is tried to be preserved. Which is a regression, because I don't think it was this bad before.

Expected results:

Instead Thunderbird should remember the split as a percentage, and not absolute. So if I put the window to my external widescreen monitor, the split should still be at the half, not suddenly one pane super big and the other super small.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I can confirm that the behavior seems to have changed over 102 (testing Daily 113.0a1 (2023-03-26) (64-bit), Win10):
When shrinking the TB window width in Vertical View Layout...

• 102 keeps the width percentage of message list vs. message pane.
• 113 keeps the absolute width of message pane until the message list has reached its minimum width, only then does it start to shrink the message pane, too. Actually, that looks like useful behavior, too, and might be by design.

Alex?

Comment 2

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Using fixed values was the most appropriate solution due to the handling of fixed columns and resizable columns.
It gets very tricky and unpredictable to calculate the % of an element against all other child elements in the same parent, as well as resulting with something like 130% of total sum of the columns, which causes the table to break.

We could use a min-width so columns can grow when expanding the window, but that would prevent columns from shrinking when resizing the window down.

We're not gonna change this for now but if any contributor wants to tackle it and improve it, we're open for it.

Comment 3

[quadronom]

I have the feeling there is something missing here. Because the behavior is more erratic. I just experienced the message pane being suddenly in smaller in size...?!