Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

This is such an unobtrusive, useful feature that I think it should be added to the browser itself. At least the ability to resize textareas vertically.

Unfortunately the "Resizeable Form Fields" extension doesn't always work properly.

It seems that adjusting fields in one tab can affect the fields in another tab!

If you load a website and adjust a form field, then load another website (which also contains form fields) in a second tab and try to adjust the form fields in the first tab while the second tab is still loading, it won't function. Then, once the second tab has completed loading its website, adjusting form fields in the first tab can affect form fields in the second tab.

Jesse/Asa: is there a bug in file for adding this capability to Gecko? If we have working extensions and interested developers, seems like we can get this into the base product.

Asa, you're at least party wrong. Resizeable Textarea wasn't abandoned completely, at least a while ago he was working on 0.2. As far as I remember he implemented or at least tested new resizing methods. This would solve the bugs of being not able to resize textareas that were hid at first and the problem if a textarea was located on the bottom right of a page, which made resizing a pain (like the Dev-Comments field on AMO).
The next thing he wanted to implement is a saving function, that remembers the resized textarea and auto-resizes it every time you load a similar page. E.g. resizing _all_ comment fields on your blog instead of just this one.
If you're able to read German or to use Babelfish you can read the original topic here: http://www.firefox-browser.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25872&start=60

I guess you could answer in English though, most should understand.

Greetings,
xeen

Peter, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167951 seems to cover it.

Why do you find this add-on to be sooooo critical to your browsing experience? I think it's a nice feature and super cool idea...but I don't see how something like this can be a "cannot do without".

It's like having no tabs. Sure, you can do without them, but it's a pain in the rectum. Similar is having small textareas but much more to write.

Zion, the behavior you're describing has to do with how the method of resizing was originally implemented in Resizeable Textarea---which I haven't changed.

Basically draggable divs get positioned over the right, bottom and lower right corner of the textarea, and when they're moved, the textarea underneath is resized accordingly. I think until this functionality is native in Firefox/Gecko to the widget itself, there may continue to be some weird tab loading/JS conflicts.

I just updated the plugin so that it works with input boxes with type unspecified (which defaults to text).

Asa, I also notice that the resize grips are getting placed incorrectly on your blog (arg!). Sometimes they're offset to the left of the actual right edge of the text boxes and textareas. I think it has something to do with your centered page layout. When the window is 838-955px wide, the grips line up correctly. When it stretches wider than that, they remain stationary while the content recenters.

Asa will this be integrated into Firefox anytime soon (Safari 3 seems to have it)

I use greasemonkey along with this script called textarea resize.. it's even less unobtrusive then resizable text area cause it can be disabled/enabled/removed on the fly.. and probably wont need a bump as long as greasemonkey works in firefox.

Doesn't seem to work on trunk. Going back to Resizeable Textarea.

It's a nice extension, but I really wouldn't want it built into the browser. It'd encourage websites to be lazy and not give form stuff a sensible default size.

>> It's a nice extension, but I really wouldn't want it built into the browser. It'd encourage websites to be lazy and not give form stuff a sensible default size.

a few months ago i tested this email from a foriegn website and the freaking text box was about x,y = 50 pixels, i couldn't fit a full setence (5 or 6 words) without going crazy..

Asa, re: "the resize grips are getting placed incorrectly on your blog", centering your body element with margin-left: auto; and margin-right: auto; seems to mess up the offsetHeight and offsetWidth used for positioning the divs. Not even sure if this is a Gecko bug or feature or what.

offsetWidth and ~Height return wrong values from fx 1.5 on. if this is fixed in fx 2.0, i dont know.
because its impossible, to support each an every scenario (hidden textareas via "css:display=none"; ...), i work on a completly different solution, as xeen wrote.
any help is welcome, i have written justin on his site.

Raik Jürgens (Resizeable Textarea 0.1a)

Posted by: Devon on October 29, 2006 5:03 AM
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Why do you find this add-on to be sooooo critical to your browsing experience? I think it's a nice feature and super cool idea...but I don't see how something like this can be a "cannot do without".

^^^^^
I would have to agree.

Adblock = must-have.
This? A solution for a problem very few people have, IMO.

There's always a feature like Opera's Notes (and an extension for firefox) that lets you write to your heart's content outside a text field in a note-like interface, then just paste it all in when you're ready.

Buggy resizing extensions are not my idea of a must-have when you can write virtually anywhere before pasting stuff in to start with.

@ Bruce
some people dont care about ads, some people not only consume informations in the internet but want to provide them too. this people care about a textarea, with starts scrolling upwards a treeliner.

on extensionsmirror.nl are listet 928 topics about extensions, not listet at UMO.
on extensionsmirror.nl "Resizeable Textarea 0.1a" is listet on rank 13 out of all extensions listet there.
" .. A solution for a problem very few people have .. " rank 13 ???

only "Buggy resizing extensions are not my idea of a must-have", other buggy extensions are? ;-)
if you find a bug, report it. "Resizeable Textarea 0.1a" will not work an each and every textarea because of design. my new version in development will do so.

have a nice day, Raik Jürgens