Outbound translation dialogues be present at the bottom of screen when activated regardless of scrolling

[kpu]

The outbound translation (aka form form filling) feature is unusable if one has to scroll to the bottom of the page for each form element. The UI specification currently is two text areas at the bottom of the viewport (not page), one for typing and one for feedback. Ideally with a draggable and closeable pane. Something like the Firefox Web Developer tools.

Apparently WebExtensions can't access XUL so the textareas are injected to the HTML page by the extension. (Aside: is there a security problem/resource abuse issue with this if the page can write to the textareas?) Injecting notional Firefox UI elements (at least from the user perspective, but not from a XUL perspective) into the page seems error prone, but doable in most cases.

It should be possible to use position: fixed and z-order to create a bottom pane within the HTML page.

Example of roughly what I'm looking for from the Guardian's cookie warning:

Except without the veil over the top of the page and without preventing me from seeing the footer of the page.

[andrenatal]

The div is already being anchored to the bottom of the page, but may be being obfuscated due a lower z-index. Will look at it when I have time.

[kpu]

This issue is my poor attempt at converting @michnov 's e-mail to an issue

"You really have to scroll at the bottom of page to see tha form translation pane? Is it included within the page itself using HTML? This is clearly unwanted behaviour. The pane should be part of the browser and possibly movable from the bottom to the left/right side, similarly to Firefox Developer Tools."

For clarification and reproduction, @michnov.

To be clear, none of us minds how you implement it. If you want to implement it within the HTML page, fine. But from a user perspective this is how we are trying to communicate the desired UI behavior.

[andrenatal]

There's also another issue here that some websites will prevent extensions from eating/modifying the page [1], which might be the case in the guardian website.

I also will need STR the situation where you needed to scroll down in order to see the outbound translation widget: the normal behavior is it to be anchored, so I need reproducible steps.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Modify_a_web_page#modifying_pages_that_match_a_url_pattern

[kpu]

The Guardian's website was not meant as a bug report. It was meant to illustrate the kind of HTML bottom pane I was looking for. The extension was not active in that screenshot.

[michnov]

Sorry, I must have misunderstood what Chris meant by saying: "Form translation is a bit more visually obvious on-screen – provided you scroll down far enough" and I hadn't tested it myself at the time I was writing a response to Chris' analysis.

I have already tested it myself and haven't come across an example of such behavior. This issue thus can be closed.

However, I filed another issue (#16) that is closely related to this one.

[andrenatal]

Not a bug, closing.