278162 - Clicking outside the context menu dismisses the parent menu popup

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[Alex Sirota (iosart)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050112 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050112 Firefox/1.0+

When a menu entry has an assosiated context menu and you want to dismiss it by
clicking outside the context menu, namely on some other menu entry, the whole
owner menu popup is closed. This is not very user friendly - if I open a deep
menu hierarchy, then open a context menu for some menu item and then want to
dismiss it, the whole hierarchy will be popped down, and I'll have to navigate
my way back from scratch.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open the bookmarks menu 
2.Right-click an item to open its context menu
3.Click again on the item to dismiss the context menu

Actual Results:  
The whole bookmarks menu popup is closed

Expected Results:  
Only the context menu should be closed. The rest of the menu hierarchy should
remain exactly the same.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I really don't think we should allow context menus on things inside menupopups...

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

Yes, but this is FireFox, and they think that's good UI (presumably based on the
Windows start menu). Anyway nsPopupSetFrame::HidePopup is responsible.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

So what exactly would break if we just disallowed this?

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Inline management saves time, especially considering that using the manager
requires a different navigation path than the user is probably used to.  I'd
consider it a huge usability regression, as would probably a large proportion of
our user base (IE supports this).  We talked about disabling this for 0.7
because of bug 210910, but that was received in a _really_ negative manner.

There's a number of issues with when we hide popups, i.e. we want to not
collapse if someone deletes a bookmark, I think vlad's going to poke that at
some point.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Well, if you guys are going to make your UI highly depend on something
unsupported in XUL.... ;)

For reference, in a Linux Firefox build, when I follow the steps in comment 0
the bookmarks menu closes but the context menu does not -- it just sits there
over the browser window.  If I then open the bookmarks menu again and
right-click on a bookmark, the context menu moves to the click point, but below
the bookmarks menu.  Not so useful.

Comment 6

[Alex Sirota (iosart)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Inline management saves time, especially considering that using the manager
> requires a different navigation path than the user is probably used to.  I'd
> consider it a huge usability regression, as would probably a large proportion of
> our user base (IE supports this).  We talked about disabling this for 0.7
> because of bug 210910, but that was received in a _really_ negative manner.
> 
I totally agree with Mike on this. This is a huge usability feature, one that I
personally use all the time. I don't believe disabling it should be considered
an option.

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Well, then someone needs to step up to own the unowned XUL back end code.

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.