1889433 - Browser minimum height casues display issues, we should consider increasing it

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Hanna Jones [:hjones]]

Attachment: Chrome min height vs Safari min height vs Firefox min height

The minimum height for the Firefox browser is quite small: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/d7c5387a43bda5163afcb9e65e17c476c6ecf625/browser/base/content/browser.css#31-34

This causes a few different display issues - most recently it came up in the discussion around Bug 1070922 that it's possible to shrink the window down to the point where infobars are no longer fully visible. Chrome and Safari both use larger values for their minimum heights; we should consider increasing ours.

Comment 1

[Hanna Jones [:hjones]]

Attachment: example of an infobar getting cut off by browser min height

I went into detail on this in my comment on Bug 1070922, but my motivation for filing this bug was an issue where it looks like notification bar buttons are getting cut off because they get rendered below the fold when the browser window is reduced to its minimum possible dimensions.

Comment 2

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

Having a minimum window size defined in the frontend at all seems to originate in bug 897160, where a minimum window width of 425px was added for macOS and 390px on all other platforms.

Shortly after, in bug 951928, the minimum width was reduced to 335px on macOS and 300px everywhere else.

• The current minimum window size is 450x120
  https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/77f8c66362e5f18f8e7cbaf1ba3ed6286f203d33/browser/base/content/browser.css#31-34
  • The min-width of 450px was added in bug 1610497, removing the macOS-specific min-width
  • The min-height of 120px was added in bug 1699430

It looks like the screenshot in comment 0 was taken on macOS. On Windows & Linux, the results are completely different, Chrome and Firefox have similar minimum sizes.

Comment 3

[Sarah Clements [:sclements] | PTO until Oct 12th]

Mike and Hannah, is there someone that needs to be consulted in order to make a decision on changing this and prioritizing it? (It has implications for sidebar work in terms of responsive layout support).

Comment 4

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Reading through bug 897160 is certainly a blast from the past. That was probably one of the first patches I reviewed for Firefox.

One thing I think we do need to worry about a little bit is ensuring that the size rules don't apply to popup windows (which you can test from the console via something like window.open("https://www.mozilla.org", "_blank", "width=100,height=100")). That's what the #main-window:not([chromehidden~="toolbar"]) { selector is doing in bug 897160's patch. According to MDN, the minimum values for width and height for windows of that type are 100x100.

Reading through https://drafts.csswg.org/cssom-view/#web-exposed-available-screen-area, I can't see any specific call out that says that a user agent must maintain a minimum content area size of 100x100, but I imagine if we can keep that rule for now, it'd probably be best. Can we presume that the sidebar will not appear in popup windows?

Comment 5

[Hanna Jones [:hjones]]

Nothing to add that :mconley hasn't covered here really. I think if this is impacting sidebar work y'all should go ahead and change the priority on this bug/pick it up.

I imagine UX would have some thoughts on the optimal larger dimensions for the browser. Once that decision is made the dev work seems like it should be relatively straightforward.

Comment 6

[Sarah Clements [:sclements] | PTO until Oct 12th]

(In reply to Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️) from comment #4)

Reading through bug 897160 is certainly a blast from the past. That was probably one of the first patches I reviewed for Firefox.

One thing I think we do need to worry about a little bit is ensuring that the size rules don't apply to popup windows (which you can test from the console via something like window.open("https://www.mozilla.org", "_blank", "width=100,height=100")). That's what the #main-window:not([chromehidden~="toolbar"]) { selector is doing in bug 897160's patch. According to MDN, the minimum values for width and height for windows of that type are 100x100.

Reading through https://drafts.csswg.org/cssom-view/#web-exposed-available-screen-area, I can't see any specific call out that says that a user agent must maintain a minimum content area size of 100x100, but I imagine if we can keep that rule for now, it'd probably be best. Can we presume that the sidebar will not appear in popup windows?

That is correct, the sidebar won't show up in popup windows.