All themes fail to indicate mousedown on scrollbar thumbs and sliders

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

1. Switch to the Human theme if not already using it. (The problem also occurs with other themes, but I'm most concerned about the default theme.)
2. Mouse down on a button (e.g. "Help" in Power Management Preferences).
   - Observe that it goes darker to show that you're clicking it.
3. Mouse down on a checkbox (e.g. "Use sound to notify" in Power Management Preferences).
   - Observe that it goes darker to show that you're clicking it.
4. Mouse down on a radio button (e.g. "Always display an icon" in Power Management Preferences).
   - Observe that it goes darker to show that you're clicking it.
5. Mouse down on a slider (e.g. "Set display brightness to:" in Power Management Preferences), or on a scrollbar thumb.
   - Observe that ... nothing happens.

There is no apparent reason for this inconsistency. I'm aware that other OSes also make this mistake (for example Windows 95/98/2000 got it wrong but Windows XP got it right, and Mac OS 8/9 got it right but Mac OS X gets it wrong). But it's more important to be internally consistent than consistent with other OSes. And it would be quite easy to fix: make the thumb or slider a bit darker while it is being clicked.

This bug has nothing to do with mouseover effects, just mousedown feedback.

[Simon Morgan (sjmorgan)]

*** Bug 16415 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Using the Ubuntu theme the scrollbar limit are orange when the mouse is over it, isn't that enough?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

No, a mouseover effect is pretty useless for telling whether I'm clicking on a control, because it has so many false positives -- when the cursor is passing over the control on the way to something else.

It's quite backward for a control to give me feedback when I'm not touching it (mouseover), but not to give me feedback when I am touching it (mousedown).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

you don't have to click to use it, you can use scrolling with the mouse when the cursor is on the widget

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

If you mean using a scrollwheel, I don't have one of those (I use a laptop). And even if I did, I could do exactly the same thing in the actual scrollable area, e.g. the document, as in the scrollbar itself. So using a scrollwheel doesn't really count as "using" the scrollbar. :-)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

It does move the scrollbar though, why doesn't it count as moving it. Anyway better to argue upstream, not sure that's a theme bug neither

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

For the same reason as Ctrl+N doesn't count as something that should highlight the New button in GEdit or Gnumeric. Again, this bug has nothing to do with scrollwheels, it has nothing to do with mouseover effects, and occurs in the default theme that has no upstream.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that's an artwork request, reassigning to the Ubuntu theme

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

why do you think that the mouseover effect is not good enough? If you click on the slidebar the handles stay orange, if you click next to it they don't even if you mouseover the bar then

[Andrew Starr-Bochicchio (andrewsomething)]

ubuntulooks has been depricated. It is no longer developed in Ubuntu or as an upstream project. It has been superseded by gtk2-engines-murrine since intrepid, and it has been removed from the archive in lucid. Due to this, I am closing this bug as "Won't Fix."

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

More importantly, this bug is fixed in Ambiance and (to a lesser extent) in Radiance.