490138 - Scrolling tags list with some long tags causes dialogue width to change

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090425 Minefield/3.6a1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090425 Minefield/3.6a1pre

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090425 Minefield/3.6a1pre
This must have changed in one of the most recent nightlies

In the Edit this bookmark dialogue, when scrolling down the list of all tags, whenever you come across a very long tag, the dialogue will suddenly increase its width, and return to original width as soon as long tag is out of view.
I'm not sure if it's meant to be a feature, but IMO this is extremely annoying.
Just imagine you accidentally have a tag with a long name every ten tags down your list. Dialogue will constantly keep flickering and changing width while you scroll. Whatever causes this behaviour, roll it back, please.
 

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Regression range is 
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=722d92a9acdd&tochange=8bfac66fe41a

(In reply to comment #0)
> and return to original width as soon as long tag is out of view.

Not exactly.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Steps:
1. You need a lot of tags with a short name (one word) and some very long tags (multiple words). Make sure that the list in its currently wrong sort order (as reported in Bug 490130) has at least 10 short tags in a row (or as many as are needed to fill the visible area of the list completely) so that at some point of scrolling, there will be no long tags visible without scrolling.

short-tag1
short-tag2
...
A very long tag that will cause the dialogue to explode when scrolled into view

2. Scroll a long tag into view, and out of view again (provided there is another sequence of short tags after the long tag, see 1.)

Actual results:

"Edit this bookmark" dialogue changes width each time you scroll over a long tag. Depending on your sequence of long and short tags, it might change width very often while you scroll down: small - big - small - big - what a flicker! Whatever the nice theory about this behaviour might be, IMO this just feels awful and the average user won't appreciate dialogues that suddenly jump at him by getting bigger, plus all the flickering when it recontracts.

Expected results:
"Edit this bookmark" dialogue should never change size when scrolling through the list of tags.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Ops, mid-air collision, sorry Ria, I accidentally undid some of your changes, could you confirm this bug once again, please?

Comment 4

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

This does not block, does not make the feature unusable, or even close. Definitely would like polish here though.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

If the feature is to scroll down the list of tags to find a specific tag, then it *does* make that feature practically unusable because each time the dialogue jumps to somewhere, the user will lose eye contact with the list (it's like when you go down the list of entries in a phone book with your eyes and someone keeps moving the phone book back and forth every now and then...). I find this very annoying, and it might create wrong impressions about FF UI quality.

Comment 6

[Perry Wagle]

The default bookmark editor does not display the full width of the tags, truncating them at arbitrary, often NON-UNIQUE, prefixes.  If someone would point me at the source code for the "Edit This Bookmark" widget, I'd be happy to fix it myself.  It is REALLY painful to not know which of several tags you are clicking on.  I really do not need a tiny bookmark editing window.  Thanks!

Comment 7

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.