For many option menus, the items you are most likely to want to choose
are those immediately before or after the currently selected one. This
is true for more menus than those where you are most likely to want to
change to the first item or the last item. Therefore, the most efficient
behavior for an option menu is opening it so that the currently selected
item is immediately under the pointer, because that results in least
mouse movement and eye movement to access the previous/next items.
Opening some menus this way, and some another way -- or worse, the same
menu different ways depending on where the window happens to be on the
screen -- would be nasty, because you could no longer rely on where the
previous and next items were going to be, so you would be slower every
time you used an option menu. (Indeed, we already have this problem with
option menus in Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.org, because they
do not use the native GTK controls.)
This placement means that sometimes there are items that you need to
scroll the menu to see, even though there is initially space available
above or below the currently visible items. Currently GTK does this by
drawing the menu to cover the area the items would take up if you
scrolled far enough. In some cases this also provides a useful hint as
to how long the menu is altogether (the Language menu in Epiphany's
"Detailed Font Settings" is a good example of this). The drawback is
that it looks a little odd.
It would be quite hard to measure whether abolishing the initial empty
area slowed people down at all when using the menu, and if it did,
whether the increase in beauty was worth it. But it isn't a clear enough
case for us to diverge from upstream GTK.
** Changed in: hundredpapercuts
Status: Confirmed => Invalid
** Changed in: gtk+2.0 (Ubuntu)
Status: Triaged => Invalid
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ComboBox has a big blank area above the position of its control
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/388633
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Desktop Bugs, which is a bug assignee.
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