991356 - Widget panel sometimes doesn't position itself properly

Status: NEW

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

Attachment: How the panel positions itself normally

(I'm not sure where to put this, change the blocking/component as you see fit.)

As you can see from the screenshots, if the widget that opens a panel, in this case the history button, is placed somewhere where it's unlikely that the panel will fit in its normal position (bottomcenter topright), sometimes it is opened there anyway, going off-screen.

To reproduce (sometimes) place the history button in the nav-bar, then resize the window so that it's hard for the panel to open below the button.

And now the tricky part, most of the time the panel happens normally. So you may have to click like a madman on that history button until it happens (seriously, pretend you're playing counter-strike or something, click away).

I think it happens most often when you move the mouse within the button while clicking. Basically just click in different places of the button (without exiting its borders of course). I don't mean mousedown-mousemove-mouseup. I mean just single click and move at the same time and in between and repeat; just keep the mouse moving continuously. It might take a while to get the hang of it.

I'm not sure if this happens for all widgets/panels (maybe it's a specific widget size/position/space-available kind of ratio?), personally I reproduce it most often with the history widget, but I've also done it with the panel from an add-on's widget (SDK) and I've also been told it also happens for the developer tools widget; although with that last one I can't get to bug out, nor with the bookmarks widget.

Comment 1

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

Attachment: How the panel positions itself sometimes but shouldn't

Comment 2

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

Oh, I should mention I've only seen this in Windows 7 and 8, but I really haven't tested other OS's at all, so I don't know how platform-specific this actually is.

Comment 3

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Setting P5, because this sounds quite edge-casy to me.

Comment 4

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

I expected as much and I understand completely of course. Just posted to say that, in that case, I think bug 991576 should be considered at least.

Comment 5

[Marc Auslander]

I think this is what I reported in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=977623

Comment 6

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

I don't agree. Bug 977623 is about whether the panel should open outside of the window (overlapping the desktop) if it has space there, this is about opening them off-screen (see screenshots), and that is just wrong since you can't move your mouse off-screen to use them.

Comment 7

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

So I can't reproduce this anymore, and neither can the user who originally reported this to me as a bug in one of my add-ons. Does anyone know if maybe another bug fixed this? I'm not sure if I should close this bug without knowing what happened, so I'll let someone else decide that.

Comment 8

[Abe - QA (:Abe_LV)]

Changing the component while cleaning up the Untriaged list.
If this component is not the right fit, please assign to the appropriate one. Thanks

Comment 9

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

I would say that's a good component, although I'm not sure. As I mentioned originally, I didn't really know where to put it, so I'm probably not the best person to evaluate that.