932578 - Allow sidebars to be different widths

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Sophia Lofgren]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131025151332

Steps to reproduce:

Open IMacros extension sidebar, resize to be larger, hit Ctrl + B or Ctrl + H to open bookmarks or history.


Actual results:

History and bookmarks retain width of iMacros sidebar. 


Expected results:

It makes sense for sidebars with different functionality to be able have different widths. This is maybe more a feature request than a bug, but it is something that frustrates me on an ongoing basis. I often use bookmarks, IMacros, and history and would like all three to be different widths. However, whenever I resize one, it resizes the other two. There's no compelling reason why it works this way from a usability perspective and seems to have been done as a result of the easiest technical implementation.

Comment 1

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Even without considering the IMacros plugin, if I am looking at the History sidebar, adjust it to be a particular width, then switch to Bookmarks with Ctrl-B, the Bookmarks sidebar opens in the same width as the History one that I just left.  So it seems to me that you're saying that you'd like all different sidebars to be configurable to have different default widths.

Comment 2

[Sophia Lofgren]

Hi Liz! Yes, this behavior is present even without IMacros. I mentioned IMacros as an example because I think that the behavior is most frustrating with extensions that use sidebars. Having your bookmarks and history always be the same width isn't much of a problem in my experience. However, it can be very frustrating with extensions because the content is often much different and so that content is often better displayed in a sidebar of a much different width.

Comment 3

[Ben McCann]

I would agree with everything in the above comment. My company develops a sidebar extension and we've had a fair amount of trouble with this. The extension API won't let us set the width since it would affect all sidebars. Since we can't set the width, our content can sometimes look really bad. Many of our users are not very technical and don't realize the sidebar width can be adjusted and just end up uninstalling our extension as a result.

Comment 4

[Peter Kehl]

If you vote for this issue, please consider also voting for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=962861 - Sidebars to be selected and turned off/on independently.

Comment 5

[Teejay]

I also would like to see this option available. At least give us an option to slightly extend the default width. The current one is often not big enough.

Comment 6

[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.