gmail toolbar scrolls over the message content

[Bill Filler]

build r67 on krillin

Using the Gmail webapp or Webbrowser-app I see the same behavior. Log into gmail and open an email message. You'll notice a toolbar on the top right (with Folder icon, Trash icon, and Down arrow icon).

When you scroll the message, the toolbar jumps around on the page. Scrolling from bottom of page to top make it disappear and reappear at the top. Scrolling from top to bottom makes the toolbar scroll down with the content and then finally anchor in the page. It's very apparent the slower you scroll. It's quite annoying when trying to read email.

I tried this in Chrome for Android and it does not have the same behavior. The toolbar is fixed in the page there and does not exhibit the same behavior that we do.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I can observe the issue, and I’ve verified that the behaviour is different from what we get on chrome on android.

Those differences in UI/UX are very likely a consequence of the UA string.

Interestingly, looking at the logs of the gmail webapp, and more specifically those that indicate that an overridden UA string was sent for a given request, I’m seeing that the first few requests are sent with this UA string:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Ubuntu 14.04 like Android 4.4) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chromium/35.0.1870.2 Mobile Safari

whereas the subsequent requests are sent with this one:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Ubuntu 14.04 like Android 4.4) AppleWebKit/537.36

This looks like a bug in the UA override mechanism. Not sure whether that would fix the floating toolbar issue though, but worth looking into anyway.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I can’t reproduce the bug I mentioned above with the truncated UA override. However I can still observe the floating toolbar, which strongly suggests that it’s a consequence of our overridden UA string for mail.google.com:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Ubuntu 14.04 like Android 4.4) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chromium/35.0.1870.2 Mobile Safari

We could probably try and devise a UA string override for mail.google.com that would get us the exact same UI/UX as chrome on android, however from experience this is a tedious, error-prone and regression-prone process.

On the other hand I agree that the floating toolbar may get mildly annoying while reading e-mails. But that seems to be the intended behaviour when served this version of the UX.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I can confirm that by replacing the override for mail.google.com with a chrome on android UA string, I’m getting a fixed toolbar at the top, not a floating one. The UA I used for testing is the following one:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; Galaxy Nexus Build/IMM76B) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.133 Mobile Safari/535.19

(from https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/user-agent)

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

What file do I change to test this UA override?
Also, there are a few other behavior differences between our version and
Chrome from Android version that might get addressed by the UA change.
Specifically, replying to an email. In Ubuntu Touch, the body of the
replied message looks quite ugly with misaligned >> characters at the
beginning of the line. In Android, the body has clean lines down the side
making it easy to read the message you are replying to.

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 10:32 AM, Olivier Tilloy <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> I can confirm that by replacing the override for mail.google.com with a
> chrome on android UA string, I’m getting a fixed toolbar at the top, not
> a floating one. The UA I used for testing is the following one:
>
> Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; Galaxy Nexus Build/IMM76B)
> AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.133 Mobile
> Safari/535.19
>
> (from https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/user-agent)
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1374562
>
> Title:
> gmail toolbar scrolls over the message content
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/webbrowser-app/+bug/1374562/+subscriptions
>

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

> What file do I change to test this UA override?

/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/qml/Ubuntu/Web/ua-overrides-mobile.js

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Related to bug #1375889.