45374 - Open sidebar by hovering over grippy

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Mistral]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; m17) Gecko/20000712
BuildID:    20000712

I
saw that a lot of people do not like the SideBar because it takes a great part
of the browser window...and a lot of people think that it will be much better if
it worked as the Bookmarks bar in IE...

I agree with this, but I think that there is an
inteligent solution of all this problems. Why don't you make the Sidebar
sensible to the movements of the mouse. In the default state, the sidebar will
be represented by a very thin vertical line on the left side of the broser
window. When the user wants to open it, it puts the mouse's cursor to the far
left side of the window and the Sidebar will appear.

This will solve the problems with the
visible part of the window and will make the SideBar much easier to access than
the actual one or even the IE bookmarks bar.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.bvcbcvb
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Andrew Thompson]

Huh? You can open and close the sidebar by single clicking the "grippy" in its 
border. Click once and it's gone...

Making it open and close on mouseover, without clicking, would be extremely 
annoying. More annoying than auto-hide on the Windows task bar, because its far 
wider (and slower).

It would constantly be poping open when you went to click a link down the left 
hand margin of a web page.

Whether it should be open or closed by default is debatable - but whichever is 
best it will be open on the netscape release for marketing/product 
differentiation reasons. Truth is, if it weren't open by default a lot of 
people would never find it...

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

this is probably a good bug for the UI Design Feedback component.

Comment 3

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Yeah, what lordpixel said. Recommend WONTFIX.

Comment 4

[Brendan Donohoe]

Auto-open controls work much better when target is fixed at the edge of the screen.  You can come close to that when the window is maximized, but there's still going to be a thin margin past the sidebar which makes it hard to target.  Also, the sidebar is far more complex than the Windows task bar or even the IE sidebar (that auto-opened in the Mac version 4.5), making it less suited to an auto-open control.

On top of all that, drawing speed has to be lightning quick for auto-open controls.  Therefore, I'm going to recommend WONTFIX.  Although I very much like auto-open controls when done right, I don't think the sidebar is suited to the task at this point.

Comment 5

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Verified wontfix.

Comment 6

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

*** Bug 64136 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

*** Bug 87528 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***