468684 - "Bubble" styling in exptoolbar leads to inconsistent toolbar heights

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Ben Lerner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: All nightlies from 20081209: TB3.0b2pre, Gloda Addressbook, Exptoolbar, Lightning

I try to keep up with the latest nightlies to see the various changes going into TB, and they generally look awesome.  And while I know the UI for all these bits are not yet polished, I wanted to point out one minor annoyance that should be easily fixable: when switching between tabs, if one tab's exptoolbar has some "bubbled" text and another does not, then the toolbar changes height by a couple of pixels.  This leads to an unnecessary and slightly annoying reflow as the tab bar shifts up or down accordingly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open TB, with exptoolbar and either lightning or gloda extensions installed
2. Open another tab (lightning or gloda address book)
3. Ctrl+tab back and forth
Actual Results:  
By default the Inbox tab causes the exptoolbar to say "[[Inbox]] Search messages..." where [[Inbox]] is bubbled.  The other tabs initially only have "Search messages...", with no bubbles.  So the toolbar grows or shrinks by a pixel or two, and so the tab bar shifts by a pixel or two.

Expected Results:  
Keep a consistent height for the toolbar at all times.

Related polish bugs: bug 352458, bug 386219, and the attachment in bug 431237 show the kind of shifting around I mean.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This doesn't happen for me on mac, so more likely a Windows/Linux.

Comment 2

[Ben Lerner]

The styling for the exptoolbar changed between yesterday and today (r77 and r79) to add more padding, such that this bug is no longer an issue on XP.  There are new problems with it, though -- 

1) it's a weird middle height between small icons and large icons, and doesn't respect my request for small icons

2) when I tried to confirm that I was using small icons, it turns out I was, so I clicked cancel as I didn't want to make any changes...and the toolbar moved around!  the Write button moves to the right, and gets surrounded by extra padding

3) The Write button has three states -- normal, hover, and clicked -- and the clicked state is 1px too short.  To see that, mouseover the button, mouse down, and move the mouse over and off of the button, repeatedly.  You'll see the rest of the UI slide up and down 1px.

I know the exptoolbar is very experimental, so I don't know if bugzilla is the right forum for feedback or whether a more informal mechanism would suffice.  I'd be happy to keep updating to latest experimental versions and testing them out, but would want to do so without spamming bugzilla inordinately...

(Also -- might it be possible to expand on the Lightning Nightly Updater to include nightly builds of glodabook and exptoolbar?  Looking at the code, it seems simple enough to do...)

Comment 3

[Ben Lerner]

I have a reworked version of LNU that updates GlodaBook and ExpToolbar as well.  It should be fairly easy to extend further, if there are other common, experimental pieces of functionality being implemented as addons for now.  Where should I send it?

Comment 4

[David Ascher (:davida)]

Ben, that's really cool.  Does it update all three w/o asking, or can people choose which addons they want to track?

As to where to put it, would AMO work (probably as a different add-on - i don't know how many lightning users want to track these other things)

Comment 5

[David Ascher (:davida)]

(In reply to comment #2)

> I know the exptoolbar is very experimental, so I don't know if bugzilla is the
> right forum for feedback or whether a more informal mechanism would suffice. 
> I'd be happy to keep updating to latest experimental versions and testing them
> out, but would want to do so without spamming bugzilla inordinately...

I'm sure there are lots of problems w/ the styling -- this is still very, very early, so I don't think it's necessary to file bugs on that yet.  When we think it's closer to done, we'll somehow advertise that.  

Maybe we should just keep this bug as a placeholder, and we'll add a comment when we're ready for this kind of feedback.

Comment 6

[Ben Lerner]

Attachment: snapshot of download screen

Comment 7

[Ben Lerner]

(In reply to comment #4)

Glad you like it :)  I just uploaded a screenshot of the main download dialog.  The idea is, it uses the same logic as LNU uses for Lightning/GData, and checks the file modification time for lightning/gdata/glodabook/exptoolbar's chrome.manifest files, and then gives you the option to select which of the four you want to download.  If your installed version's modtime is more recent than the latest version online, it disables that option; otherwise, it'll download the ones you check and InstallTrigger.install them, just like LNU.  Additionally, it'll show you the timestamp you have and what's available, and give a direct link to all four extensions.

Obviously I haven't polished the UI yet (the groupbox is redundant; the captions are wrong and non-localized), but that's the idea.  It WFM, but comments and other addons to track are welcomed.  If there are enough of them, and if they have a common enough form online, I'll code a more generic way to add new ones; for now, it's hard-coded to parse the FTP response page.

Comment 8

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> As to where to put it, would AMO work (probably as a different add-on - i don't
> know how many lightning users want to track these other things)

One option would be to contact the Lightning Nightly Updater author and ask him if he would include the new items in his extension.

Comment 9

[Ben Lerner]

*crickets chirping, tumbleweed blowing*

I haven't heard back from the LNU author, after emailing over the changes I'd made to LNU.  So those changes have just been sitting on my computer, doing nobody any extra good.  If there's another extension I should track too, I'd be happy to add that, and publish the revised LNU to AMO where it would do more good...

Comment 10

[klonos]

yes, please do so

Comment 11

[klonos]

BTW, trying to confirm the bug with latest 3.1 nightlies of tb and latest lightning nightlies + exptoolbar r97 & glodabook r2. Don't see it (perhaps screenshots or more detailed description as to what/where to look for it would help)

Comment 12

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

In terms of updates to the exptoolbar family of extensions, I think it would be reasonable and appropriate to publish them on AMO.  It's sort-of an expired to-do item for me.  The issue is that they aren't getting a lot of/any love right now, and in fact I sorta broke exptoolbar a bit with my last change.  (I have a fix, but I think it makes other problems crop up.)

Along those lines, Ben, if you have a patch for the problem on this bug, or patches for other enhancements to exptoolbar/friends, I would be glad to review them.  (And in order to avoid you blocking on me too much, it would be ideal if you had your own mercurial repo published somewhere so your changes don't simply exist as patches floating in bugzilla.)

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

so we can confirm this issue? 
Or is exptoolbar dead at this point?

Comment 14

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

It is an ex-exptoolbar.