660420 - Request: Submenu structures should continue to open in one direction as long as there is space

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: XUL, enhancement)

Description

[Dennis Schieferdecker]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Submenus open to the right by default. If there is not enough room, they are opened to the left instead. For menus that are on the far right of the screen this leads to an odd behaviour if they have lots of submenu levels: The first submenu level is opened to the left, the second to the right, the third to the left again and so on.
A more natural feeling solution would be to the let submenus continue to open in one direction until the end of the screen (or a predefined threshold width in pixels or percentage of screenwidth) in that direction is reached before switching the direction until the end of the screen is reached in that direction, too.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create bookmark folder structure with a lot of subfolder levels
2. Use bookmark button to the far right of the bookmark toolbar 
3. Browse through all levels of the bookmarks

Actual Results:  
The first submenu level opens to the left, the second to the right, the third to the left and so on - always switching if the menu widths are about the same.

Expected Results:  
The submenu levels should continue to open to the left until they reach the end of the screen (or another defined threshold) then open to the right again until they reach the other side of the screen and so on.

Comment 1

[Alice0775 White]

Duplicate of Bug 637208?

Comment 2

[Dennis Schieferdecker]

Actually this bug is not a direct duplicate of Bug 6372087 but a generalisation to arbitrary submenus. The bookmark menu is just used as an example due to its easy accessability.

Comment 4

[Kai Liu]

This should be a relatively easy thing to change.  The question is whether or not we should change it because the current behavior (which I admit seems broken) is consistent with what native applications in the Windows OS does (haven't checked Linux yet).

Comment 5

[Kai Liu]

Native apps in Gnome do this too.  So... if we change this, we will be deviating from a broad OS convention and any user expectations that may come with that.  This is not to say that the current behavior is smart (or desirable), but that care should be taken with a change like this...