940012 - Append a flexible space to the end of toolbars, or toolbars that are mostly empty.

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement)

Description

[nemo]

So.  I found the new heaven trigram menu button a bit too big and blobby and missing stuff I'm used to.  Firefox Button is no longer an option, so I decided to move back to the Menu bar which had things I missed anyway, like bug #856787.

While I was at it, I decided to rearrange things a bit to put a few useful items on the far right of the menu bar.
Unfortunately, since the menu bar is mostly empty space apart from the menu text which takes up about 20% of the space for me, the result was that I was unable to place anything on the right.

The behaviour that would be nice would be something similar to what you would get if you enabled the Menu bar pre-Australis, enabled Customize, then added a Flexible Space.

The items dropped anywhere to the right of the midpoint of the flexible space covering all that emptiness are placed right.
Those dropped anywhere to the left of the midpoint, are placed left.

Regrettably, flexible space behaviour on, oh, a mostly empty toolbar is less straightforward in pre-Australis.  The flexible space takes up about have the space, so items dropped to the left of it appear mid-page.  I'm sure there's some good explanation for this, and hopefully you guys could handle this odd behaviour with some tweak.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Question being, if the user drags an item to the far right of an otherwise mostly empty toolbar, far away from other items in said toolbar, could we automatically add a spacer? Is that confusing? How would we give an affordance to get rid of the spacer again? Should we just not worry about this at all? Or just provide a way to add spacers etc. to the toolbars that's toggled by an about:config pref? Is that a dumb idea too? :-)

Comment 2

[nemo]

BTW, I accidentally left a word out.

" a mostly empty toolbar is less"
should read
" a mostly empty bookmarks toolbar is less"

I have no idea why the bookmarks toolbar acts that way, but it is a good candidate for dropping stuff on the right.

Comment 3

[nemo]

So, I found a way to do what I want...
Delete nightly, download the pre-Australis nightly.  Add the flexible space using the old Customise tool, and toss some widget in on the right just so you know it's there.  Allow nightly to update again, and widgets can now be added on the right using the more limited Australis Customise.

Comment 4

[Charles Evans]

An easier workaround: 
add-on "Classic Theme Restorer" adds several flex-spaces to the 
customize menu (is there a bug about this regression?) 
Just don't lose them or you're stuck - I lost all the extra dividers.
Some add-on also does the auto-flex thing you are looking for:
Try "The Addon Bar (restored)" or "Vertical Toolbar"? 
I use all 3.

Comment 5

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> Question being, if the user drags an item to the far right of an otherwise
> mostly empty toolbar, far away from other items in said toolbar, could we
> automatically add a spacer? Is that confusing? How would we give an
> affordance to get rid of the spacer again? Should we just not worry about
> this at all? Or just provide a way to add spacers etc. to the toolbars
> that's toggled by an about:config pref? Is that a dumb idea too? :-)

I think trying to determine which end of the space someone thought they were adding the item to would be awkward.

Adding back in flexible and static spacers might not be a bad idea, but not something I think we should add to the list for 29.

Comment 6

[alex_mayorga]

Mr. Horlander,

Could you please confirm if bug 985308 is a duplicate of this one?

Comment 7

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Well, it is, partially. But I'm gonna dupe it anyway since fixing the other bug will fix this bug as well.

Comment 8

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This really isn't a dupe. It probably requires 985308, but to automatically deal with spacers is clearly different from whether or not they appear in the customization mode toolbox.

Comment 9

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

FYI.
"The Addon Bar (Restorered) 3.2" now added Flixible Space/Space/Separator support to Toolbar Customization Panel which was sadly removed by Firefox 29.
https://addons.mozilla.org/ja/firefox/addon/the-addon-bar/

Comment 10

[marnick.leau]

Is there a general idea of when this will be taken care of yet? I really miss my separators and installing an addon like Classic Theme Restorer or Addon Bar Restored is total overkill for me that just brings a ton of extra complications. I really don't see how these simple things can be such a drag for Mozilla. They're not difficult for users to understand and Mozilla doesn't need to provide any sort of automatic behavior or other complicated stuff.

Comment 11

[marnick.leau]

(In reply to marnick.leau from comment #10)
> Is there a general idea of when this will be taken care of yet? I really
> miss my separators and installing an addon like Classic Theme Restorer or
> Addon Bar Restored is total overkill for me that just brings a ton of extra
> complications. I really don't see how these simple things can be such a drag
> for Mozilla. They're not difficult for users to understand and Mozilla
> doesn't need to provide any sort of automatic behavior or other complicated
> stuff.

Never mind, wrong bug, sorry.