The 'common dialogs' dialogs (password prompt, basic alerts etc) currently can resize to different widths, depending on the dialog content. This means that the width of a simple alert dialog can vary, depending on the exact wording of the message. This should not happen. For consistency, and user-predictability, these dialogs should have a fixed width, and only change their height. This is how Mac alert dialogs behave. This is probably as simple as setting a max-width on the <window> tag in commondialogs.xul.

Changing platform

isn't this an issue on all platforms?

All platforms

nsICommonDialogs has been replaced by nsIPrompt, so this is not an issue any more. Correct?

Reproduced in build 2001082408, Mac OS 9.1. Compare javascript:alert("foo") with javascript:alert("bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar") . They should be the same width, but they're not.

marking p2 and mozilla0.9.7

This doesn't apply to Windows. javascript:alert("foo") javascript:alert("bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar") should produce dialogs of two different widths.

Can you point to the UI guidelines that say this?

I'm just going from how MessageBox() behaves under Windows, since the examples mpt gave are message dialogs. However, message dialogs aren't "common dialogs" in the Windows sense. Common dialogs in Windows are File Open, File Save, etc. And there seems to be no standard width for these, especially since they can be over-ridden with a custom template and they are resizeable as of Win2K/Me.

Moving to mozilla0.9.8

Pushing out to mozilla1.0.1

-> default assignee

Is this just cosmetic/aesthetic, or can you document a real problem scenario for real users? cc marlon for ue input.

It's somewhat of a usability problem. If the dialog is always a different width, then it's unpredictable where the OK button will be. I can't take advantage of muscle memory to dismiss these dialogs with the mouse. It's also ugly.

Based on comment 7 and common 9, is this Mac-only?

Simon: if we constrain the width, the height will change; either way the OK button would move. BTW, though I don't discount the desirability of consistency in the width of these dialogs, I can't find any reccomendation covering this in MHIG, and don't know of any reasons why small variations would make them less usable. Also, ugly is pretty subjective, and hard to factor in when triaging too many bugs. ->jag

I'm basically recommending that we follow the behaviour of StandardAlert() on Mac, that resizes only vertically to accomodate the text.

So what you're really saying is that common dialogs of the "Alert" persuasion should have a fixed width?

...on Mac

Alerts, and also password dialogs etc, on Mac. We throw up some password dialogs with ridiculously long entry fields.

Hrm.. I think the fixed-width alert request is Mac-specific, but I think the rediculously long password dialog problem is XP. I've definitely run into it on Windows.

-> 1.2

On Windows, we at least want a maximum size so dialogs like "set default browser?" don't look so wacky.