One longstanding UI gripe I have with NetSurf (in fact, I think it's about
my only serious remaining gripe) arises whenever a link has an overlong URL.
The first part of the URL appears to the left of the bottom scroll bar. But
if the URL is obnoxiously long, as often happens, the right part is
truncated and AFAICS there is no way to access it. I /really/ hate not
knowing where is a link is going to take me, or not being able to tell the
filetype of something without starting to download it.
A fix which would mitigate matters is if the proportion of the lower scroll
bar (or, even better, the absolute size in pixels) allocated to the
horizontal scroll was configurable and/or persistent from window to window.
I am getting quite tired of shrinking the h-scroll and then following a
link, only for the new link to come up in a new window with the old 50%
horizontal-scroll bar width! I do wish it would at least follow the size
setting of the window it was opened from, particularly as I find it fiddly
to select the tiny 'hotspot area' of the h-scroll bar width slider.
I appreciate that some URLs are impossibly long, and only a multi-line URL
display would ever be able to fully display them, but in the meantime there
are several ways you could mitigate the problem. (e.g. a key shortcut that
toggles full-length (or at least a longer) URL display, a hovering link
display tooltip, using the !Help application to display the link, etc.)
Personally I would be happy to have the URL given a whole line of its own,
even though that would sacrifice some vertical screen space, because I feel
this info is important enough to justify such a usage. And a full line would
usually be sufficient space, whereas on my setup half a line often isn't.
If the devs accept bribes for this kind of feature, please just let me know
your pricelist. I'd be happy to pay in beer...
--
Simon Smith | Once more unto now
| Is the winter to be or
| 'Tis the east (Exit.)
| -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
