406629 - Sidebars (history, bookmarks) should not have maximum width

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Sidebar, defect, P2)

Description

[Timwi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

I tried to drag the splitter to the right of the History pane (Ctrl+H) in order to be able to see long titles.

It turns out the History pane has an arbitrary maximum width set. Please remove that.

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
Width does not increase beyond an arbitrarily chosen maximum width.

Expected Results:  
The user should be in control of the width.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I can't find a duplicate, so confirming. 

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The max width has been there since forever, presumably to prevent it from being possible to accidentally "take over" the window with the sidebar content.

Comment 3

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

There is a little bit about max sidebar width in bug 310291.  But not much about why it's set at all.  

Comment 4

[Timwi]

The Severity of this bug should not be "enhancement". This is a significant usability problem because it means that it is genuinely impossible to display the list of bookmarks or the history in the sidebar completely.

Comment 5

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

With 50em, like originally suggested in bug 310291 you can see the full text of most history items. I don't see the objections of even making it larger, like 60em. At the moment I'm using a bottom bar which works even better, because it doesn't have the problem of comment 2 and you can see very loooong titles fully.

Comment 6

[Timwi]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. You certainly didn't provide any argument why the sidebar should have a maximum width.

Comment 8

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

this also applies to web pages that have "open in sidebar" set in their bookmark.

Comment 9

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11)
> Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
> 
> I tried to drag the splitter to the right of the History pane (Ctrl+H) in order
> to be able to see long titles.

Note that there's a tooltip to reveal the full title. It's possible/likely that this wasn't the case back in the days of Firefox 2.

Comment 11

[fiveNinePlusR]

It seems like now that webextensions are allowed to be sidebars that the max width should be allowed to be larger. (perhaps up to 49.9%?).

Any thoughts?

Comment 12

[Jotaf]

This is an issue for addons -- while it can be argued that the current max width is "good enough" for History/Bookmarks (though for long titles many could disagree), addons are diverse and one size does not fit all.

For example, this impacts the Side View addon: https://github.com/mozilla/side-view/issues/420

Comment 13

[Leonardo Gama]

I don't know if it is related, but there are two recent reviews for the Side View add-on that complain about not being able to resize the sidebar to more than 10% of screen width:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/reviews/1706955/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/reviews/1736878/

I can't reproduce this. My sidebar in updated Firefox expands to ~40% of screen size (528px).

Comment 14

[u710097]

And it should not have minimum width neither😂

Comment 15

[BelFox]

Good points made in comment 11 and comment 12.

Increasing the maximum width for sidebars to 49,9% (which seems to be easily implemented) would allow for significant improvements:

• Users can expand the bookmarks/history sidebar if they want to, for example to read long titles
• Users of the SideView add-on can display two web pages properly side-by-side
• Other add-ons can use the increased sidebar space for novel features and interfaces

(I seem to remember this max. width limitation wasn't there in the past??)

Would it be possible to uplift the Severity to S3 and include this in a coming Nightly release to test for unforeseen issues?
A small step for developers, but a giant leap for Firefox's functionality ;-)
Thanks!

Comment 16

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:sclements, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 17

[Sarah Clements [:sclements]]

We'll make the sidebar panel width resizeable up to 75% of the viewport, per the request from product/UX in the spec. But together with the expanded sidebar and open sidebar panel they should together occupy max 75% width. The width should continue to be persisted with this change, although if a user resizes a window it should shrink back and then persist that size.

Comment 18

[Kelly Cochrane [:kcochrane]]

Attachment: Bug 406629 - Setting sidebar max-width to 75 percent of viewport width

Comment 19

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/92140bc971d8
Setting sidebar max-width to 75 percent of viewport width r=sidebar-reviewers,Gijs,sclements

Comment 20

[Serban Stanca [:SerbanS]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/92140bc971d8