637649 - Status bar overlay does not elide URL properly, widens entire content pane (w/Vertical Tabs add-on installed)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

See: http://people.mozilla.org/~beltzner/firefox-b12-bug.mov

I cannot reproduce this locally, but Phil (who reported it to me) can, and we should figure out what's happening here. It seems like for Phil, no eliding of the URL is happening, and so the overlay ends up widening the entire content area which ... does poor things with the layout on this particular web page.

We should add some form of guard that ensures that the status bar overlay never widens the entire content area.

Comment 1

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Phil was testing on the "Fixed in this beta" link at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_4.0b12

Comment 2

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Dao - can you have a look?

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

It looks like the label doesn't get cropped, which shouldn't happen. Can Phil reproduce this in safe mode or with a new profile?

Comment 4

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Oh, this appears to have been caused by an add-on. Should still probably make sure that's not possible, and somewhat worried that it will be a common problem with add-ons!

Both Vlad and Phil saw this with Vertical Tabs installed - philIKON, can you replicate? Do you know why your thing might be causing the eliding to break?

Comment 5

[Philipp von Weitershausen [:philikon]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> See: http://people.mozilla.org/~beltzner/firefox-b12-bug.mov

The jiggering shown in this video was something that Vertical Tabs caused in version 0.7.2. fryn fixed this, the fix is in 0.7.4 which sadly hasn't passed review yet *shakes fist at AMO*. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/versions/

Though I don't see Vertical Tabs being installed at all in the video... Maybe it's another add-on being victim to the same pitfall as VT?

(In reply to comment #4)
> Oh, this appears to have been caused by an add-on. Should still probably make
> sure that's not possible, and somewhat worried that it will be a common problem
> with add-ons!

Not sure how much we can prevent these things. It's all CSS, add-ons can pretty much do whatever the heck they want. That said, I found the position: absolute styling of the status bar a bit disturbing, making it difficult to move around (which is what Vertical Tabs does.)

Comment 6

[Phil Schwan]

(In reply to comment #5)
> 
> Though I don't see Vertical Tabs being installed at all in the video... Maybe
> it's another add-on being victim to the same pitfall as VT?

It was; the sidebar was just collapsed, in order to focus everyone's laser-like attention on the issue at hand.

Sounds like it's fixed anyway; thanks.

Comment 7

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> The jiggering shown in this video was something that Vertical Tabs caused in
> version 0.7.2. fryn fixed this, the fix is in 0.7.4 which sadly hasn't passed
> review yet *shakes fist at AMO*. See
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/versions/
> 
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > Oh, this appears to have been caused by an add-on. Should still probably make
> > sure that's not possible, and somewhat worried that it will be a common problem
> > with add-ons!
> 
> Not sure how much we can prevent these things. It's all CSS, add-ons can pretty
> much do whatever the heck they want. That said, I found the position: absolute
> styling of the status bar a bit disturbing, making it difficult to move around
> (which is what Vertical Tabs does.)

I agree with Philipp. Given our add-ons architecture, it's impossible to prevent add-ons from causing the content area to expand, especially since XUL expands containers to fit their children (which is what happened here). Add-ons that use regular sidebars (without attempting to fix bug 630079 themselves) will not cause this, so this doesn't block 628654. Vertical Tabs includes special code to avoid overlapping sidebars, which causes this bug. Since this isn't a bug in Firefox and simply needs to be avoided when bug 630079 is fixed, I'd call this one INVALID. Unless anyone strongly disagrees, I'll mark it so in a couple days.

For anyone curious, here's the workaround I used, which fixed the content area widening / sidebar overlap and partially fixed the "mirror" appearance of the overlay in Vertical Tabs:
https://github.com/fryn/VerticalTabs/blob/master/skin/base.css#L3
We'll need something more robust than that in our code.

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> For anyone curious, here's the workaround I used, which fixed the content area
> widening / sidebar overlap and partially fixed the "mirror" appearance of the
> overlay in Vertical Tabs:
> https://github.com/fryn/VerticalTabs/blob/master/skin/base.css#L3
> We'll need something more robust than that in our code.

I used position:relative in my initial implementation. It affected the vertical size of the content area, causing a test failure.