Google Suggest drop-down list too narrow in Firefox

[Till Ulen]

Binary package hint: firefox

The Google Suggest drop-down list is too narrow by default in Firefox 2.0 (I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.5+1-0ubuntu1 from 7.04 Feisty).

See the screenshot attached. I'm using the default theme and fonts at the resolution of 1024x768. The mouse pointer doesn't appear in the screenshot; it was just pointing to the selected entry.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox.

2. In the search bar, select the Google search engine icon and type in a common word that is not too short.

3. A drop-down list from Google Suggest appears which contains several indistinguishable suggestions, because for each suggestion, only the first word is displayed, and the rest is replaced with an ellipsis (...) because of the shortage of horizontal space. You can only see the full suggestions as tool-tips, which is poor usability for the Suggest feature.

Expected behavior:

Make the drop-down list wider to accommodate its content as necessary.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Jul 28 21:39:38 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Package: firefox 2.0.0.5+1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
SourcePackage: firefox
Uname: Linux chronos 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Mike Connor (mconnor)]

Also, using the column truncates longer suggestions in a weird way.

[Mtschrep (mtschrep)]

Joe, can you look at what Myk recently checked in for Microsummaries? He was facing a similar issue and created a read-only menuitem that looks a lot like Beltzner's upper-left design - that, with the "Suggestions ..." text seems like the right way to go.

[Mtschrep (mtschrep)]

Joe - have you had a chance to look at this?

[Mozilla-retrovirus (mozilla-retrovirus)]

I've looked at the way Myk's doing it in microsummaries, and he's using a menu rather than the tree view that the autocomplete system uses. So it's not straightforward to do the same thing here; we'd basically need to either replace the tree view with a different type of widget, or improve the capabilities of the tree view to allow this behavior.

[Beltzner (beltzner)]

I suppose to get some room back we could just replace the start of any search term that the user has typed in with an elipses:

 ( [G] foo O.v)
  --------------------------------
  | football |
  |------------------ suggestions|
  | ..d for thought |
  | ..tball statistics |
  | ..tball records... |

I wish there were a clearer path here.

[Beltzner (beltzner)]

Uh, that comment probably belongs on another bug. But which one?

[Mike Connor (mconnor)]

Not going to hold on this, there isn't a clear fix, and its not that serious.

[Adam Guthrie (ispiked)]

*** Bug 351945 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[2newsixibh (2newsixibh)]

The shortening of the searchbar in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20060914 BonEcho/2.0 has made trying to see search history autocomplete entries virtually impossible.

[2newsixibh (2newsixibh)]

This bug is the reason I think?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348779

(In reply to comment #9)
> The shortening of the searchbar in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1;
> en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20060914 BonEcho/2.0 has made trying to see search
> history autocomplete entries virtually impossible.
>

[Pkasting (pkasting)]

(In reply to comment #10)
> (In reply to comment #9)
> > The shortening of the searchbar in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1;
> > en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20060914 BonEcho/2.0 has made trying to see search
> > history autocomplete entries virtually impossible.
>
> This bug is the reason I think?
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348779

There's no good path here.

We can set a high min width on the search and address bars, and they'll stay "usable", but can't be made small.

We can try and preserve space in one at the expense of the other, but that just means that one gets very unusable fast, and we don't know which one the user cared about.

Or we can just let both shrink equally, and trust that if the user really doesn't like that, they'll either move flexy boxes onto separate rows, or else make their window bigger.

The old behavior was close to the second of these and the new behavior is closer to the third. That seems better to me.

[Neyzzz (neyzzz)]

Created attachment 243333
A screenshot showing the problem

I've attached a screenshot showing a more irritating form of this.
The white space should auto-expand as the % of truncated results nears 100, but if that's too difficult then can it at least be used more completely?

[Nrlz (nrlz)]

While you're at it, could I also suggest that make the suggestion entries more distinct, so as not to be confused with the search history? One time someone was using my computer and typed in "hot i" and the list suggested "hot indian girls" and the guy was like, "wow I didn't know you were into Indian chicks" And I had to explain that the search bar looks for related words on the Internet dynamically.

[Gavin Sharp (gavin-sharp)]

*** Bug 360867 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[liminal (briancort)]

I recommend raising the priority of this bug, since it renders the current feature mostly unusable.

[Matt-primefactor (matt-primefactor)]

(In reply to comment #11)
> Or we can just let both shrink equally, and trust that if the user really
> doesn't like that, they'll either move flexy boxes onto separate rows, or else
> make their window bigger.

The suggestions box shouldn't be dependent on the size of the search box. Since it's a transient popup it should size to accommodate the width of the search suggestions. See my attachment with a mock-up.

[Matt-primefactor (matt-primefactor)]

Created attachment 253556
Mockup of how the search suggestions should appear.

[Till Ulen (tillulen)]

Binary package hint: firefox

The Google Suggest drop-down list is too narrow by default in Firefox 2.0 (I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.5+1-0ubuntu1 from 7.04 Feisty).

See the screenshot attached. I'm using the default theme and fonts at the resolution of 1024x768. The mouse pointer doesn't appear in the screenshot; it was just pointing to the selected entry.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox.

2. In the search bar, select the Google search engine icon and type in a common word that is not too short.

3. A drop-down list from Google Suggest appears which contains several indistinguishable suggestions, because for each suggestion, only the first word is displayed, and the rest is replaced with an ellipsis (...) because of the shortage of horizontal space. You can only see the full suggestions as tool-tips, which is poor usability for the Suggest feature.

Expected behavior:

Make the drop-down list wider to accommodate its content as necessary.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Jul 28 21:39:38 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Package: firefox 2.0.0.5+1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
SourcePackage: firefox
Uname: Linux chronos 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Thank you for the bug report, have you tried a higher res. Mine shows first work and some of second word(sometimes full word depending what im googling. Please try a higher resolution, the reason your not seeing the whole thing is due to your resolution being so low it has to fit everything on page best it can im not real sure we can do anything with this, I will check with asac on this today if we get a minute and see what he wants to do.

[Till Ulen (tillulen)]

Unfortunately my hardware doesn't support any resolutions higher than 1024x768.

And no, having the resolution set to 1024x768 or perhaps even to 800x600 is not a valid reason to truncate useful information on the screen and not even make horizontal scrolling available. There is plenty of free pixels on the screen at 1024x768 which can be used by the Suggest drop-down list (see the screenshot). Perhaps there are some technical limitations in Firefox or in its widget library that prevent making it wider. If that is the case, those limitations should be fixed as well.

One way to make the UI look better with a wider Suggest drop-down list is to dynamically widen the search box when the list is displayed and shrink the address bar correspondingly. Or at least allow the user to resize the search box manually.

I reported this issue upstream and linked this bug to the bug in the upstream Bugzilla.

[Till Ulen (tillulen)]

*** Bug 397350 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Till Ulen (tillulen)]

This bug still occurs when Firefox is 1440 pixels wide, although it is less severe then: only long words and phrases are affected.

This report has been marked Incomplete for a while. Is there anything else I can add to it so it can advance to the next status?

[James Shimada (jshimada)]

May I suggest instead of (or in addition to) making the drop down list wider, you put the ellipsis at the beginning of the google suggestion? In other words, if the suggestion is too long to fit in the drop down, put the ellipsis in place of what the user already typed! It's redundant to repeat the identical prefix for every suggestion and it wastes precious horizontal space.

[Till Ulen (tillulen)]

In Firefox 3.0 this bug is alleviated by the feature that allows you to change the width of the search field manually. However, there is no reason why you should expand the search field manually every time you enter a query that triggers long suggestions, and then revert its size to leave room for the page URL.

This bug should be fixed the same way as was suggested for Firefox 2, namely make the suggestions drop-down accommodate to its content width dynamically.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 10:01:45AM -0000, Alexander Konovalenko wrote:
> In Firefox 3.0 this bug is alleviated by the feature that allows you to
> change the width of the search field manually. However, there is no
> reason why you should expand the search field manually every time you
> enter a query that triggers long suggestions, and then revert its size
> to leave room for the page URL.
>
> This bug should be fixed the same way as was suggested for Firefox 2,
> namely make the suggestions drop-down accommodate to its content width
> dynamically.

There should be a bug open in bugzilla.mozilla.org already. Please
check and post the bug id here. If you are sure there isnt such a
wishlist, please file a new bug and post the bug id here. Thanks

 subscribe
 status incomplete

 - Alexander

[Jruderman (jruderman)]

Created attachment 361107
screenshot (Firefox trunk)

Much better than when this bug was first filed, but could still be improved.

How about leaving off the common prefix, or making the dropdown wider as needed?

[Vish (vish)]

Now that 'firefox' is the place where we are tracking all FF version bugs, Should we be switching this the other way around?
 - Status in “firefox” package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix -
 - Status in “firefox-3.0” package in Ubuntu: Triaged -

[Andrea Grandi (andreagrandi)]

I've just tested this on Ubuntu 11.10 with Firefox 8.0 and the problem is not presente anymore. I think we should mark this bug as fixed.

[Timothy Arceri (t-fridey)]

@Amstrad this is not fixed its the same as it has always been.

 However there are workarounds such as customising the toolbar. The search and url bars can be placed in different rows. I think this is more of an issue with screen space on a users pc rather than a FireFox problem. If the suggestion to have a wider drop down list than the search box is implemented it would just look really unpolished, I don't think this is a real option. In conclusion as there is a way to get around this and its only a problem with small screens or low resolution, and because the only sugested solution is a hacky looking drop down box I'm questioning whether this is really a bug?

[Lhenry (lhenry)]

This is still the case for the url bar though not for t he seach bar.
For the url bar, the dropdown still appears to be limited to the current width of the url bar. For the search bar, the dropdown can be wider than the search bar.

[Jaws (jaws)]

Yes, this is true. Our dropdowns popup will match the width of the associated field. So in the case of the merged location bar and search bar, the width of the location bar can still be narrow enough as to truncate some of the search suggestions.