It would be nice if we supported statusbar tips when you rollover menu items, as IE does (and NN 4.x). I'll do it, but (and this is the fun part ;) I need text for every menu item in the product. Ohhhhh Vera?

Do we really have room for such tips in the status bar? Even once the taskbar is nuked and the component bar becomes part of the status bar? Even once the status bar gets a language popup menu item? If we do have room, then ... Vera, if you don't have time to do this (and I wouldn't be at all surprised), let us know and I'll do it. Blake, for forwards-compatibility, you'll want to plan for an arbitrary number of strings for each menu item: * brief description of what the item does * brief explanation of why the item is disabled (if it is). I say arbitrary, because in some cases multiple menu items will share the same disabled explanation string, and in other cases a single item will have multiple disabled explanation strings. Only the description string would be shown in a status bar tip (there wouldn't really be room for anything else). But with the multi-string scheme, one day we can support Balloon Help on Mac OS using the same set of strings. :-)

blah. My good friend Ben Goodger kindly pointed out that there's no event which fires if navigating menu items via the keyboard. So unless we want to be a little inconsistent and only have this fire onmouseover, this is a big fat WONTFIX... (sorry that you wrote all that, Matthew..got a midair collision with you trying to say this)

> there's no event which fires if navigating menu items via the keyboard Well, file a bug asking for such an event.

It'll just get futured. Doing the same to this bug...

h'm, well, i'm not exactly jumping up and down for tooltips on menuitems. unless i'm picturing it incorrectly, this would kinda clutter up the menu/kinda naggy. but that's just mho/$0.02... not sure how often/useful a tip in the statusbar would fly, having not performed usibility studies meself. :-)

post-lunch coma made me misread this. this bug doesn't ask about tooltips, it asks about the statusbar. like what the summary sez. ignore everything but the last sentence in my comment above. jeepers, time for some caffeine...

somewhere there is an RFE or some such asking for this for the bookmarks menu. You would of course display the URL instead, which sounds more difficult

Sorry, I must have missed this while I was on vacation. (Ahhhh....) I think it sounds good -- it would be nice to have a demo, some day, if it becomes possible to do this. I'm keeping a list of user assistance ideas to investigate once we've got the mere basics done, and I'll put this on the list.

Ok, this is a real usability issue, i'm sorry we don't want it for netscape6 but it really is important especially when our menu items are vague (which will happen). I'm marking a block to remind me that the other item is not really finished even if I satisfy mpt's request.

> somewhere there is an RFE or some such asking for this for the bookmarks menu. bug 23460

marking dependency on 63847, reassigning to nobody until that gets fixed.

*** Bug 68571 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This bug might block bug 23460, "Bookmarks URL should show in status bar at mouseover of menuitem", with 5 votes.

> it really is important especially when our menu items are vague (which will > happen). So we'll have to fix the menu items. We can't rely on a status bar being there. We might have a window like the Bookmarks window open, where the status bar is too short to show meaningful help text. Or, we might have no windows open at all.

MPT, I disagree. Though it's true the status bar may not always be present or that it may be too short, I suspect it's unrealistic to think that the menu items can be fixed in such a way to be completely unambiguous and clear to all users. So having some sort of tip or hint in the statusbar would still be better than nothing. Also, statusbar tips are considered standard in many apps these days, so it's reasonable to think that users will look for it.

FWIW, I agree that it's good to have additional help. Sometimes, just a rewording helps some users to understand a menu item (but other users wouldn't understand the rewording, and only understand the menu item text).

adding self to cc list

Mass bug change to replace various 'parity' whiteboard flags with the new canonical keywords. (See bug 1443764 comment 13.)