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I think that replacing tabbed panes of twistie drop down components on "Preferences > Java > Editor" it not very interesting. One comment I've read about it was "The thought was that tabbed panes do not give you quick navigation between items as this twistie drop down approach does", from Michael Van Meekeren. However, I think doesn't give any differency in navigation, since when I click a tabbed pane, the related fields appear, as it does with drop down, same thing. The two bad things I see are: - For example, the Typing drop down: there are so many fields that it is needed a scroll pane do view all of them, which is not very nice in a desktop screen (anti-pattern?). If it were tabbed, the scroll was not need, since tab are placed side by side, and not vertically. - Continuing with Typing drop down, I need to close the drop down to be able to select the next drop down, for the same reason as above. Besides that, tabbed panes are the pattern for these kind of screens, drop down components are nice, but I think tabbed panes are still better in this context.
I also tend to revert to the old UI. See also bug 89494 and bug 89538. Marking those as blocked by this bug since they don't need to be addressed if we fix this one.
Maybe I am being too conservative with drop down components and vertical scroll bar. I have looked at Firefox options and in the "Privacy" panel, they employ drop down components very nicely. Maybe drop down are the new "trend" and maybe UI researches find them better, I don't know. I will use this picture (http://www.geocities.com/eduardoarantes.geo/eclipse-bug-89921.gif) to compare Eclipse and Firefox. I think the drawing (1) in Firefox looks better. Also, Firefox explicitly uses a box to group the fields (2). Besides, there is a border around the panel (3) and different background color, and I think it gives a better look.
If we revert this behavior we have to ensure that bug 67018 remains fixed.
We will revert to the old look using tabs.
I20050510-0010 In "Preferences > Java > Editor" the look was reverted to tabbed panes. What about "Preferences > Java > Compiler > Building/Errors/Warning"? Will you revert too? I saw the first change and it was nice!
Has been fixed for M7. >In "Preferences > Java > Editor" the look was reverted to tabbed panes. What >about "Preferences > Java > Compiler > Building/Errors/Warning"? Will you revert >too? This is another component but I can answer it: no, they will not convert. It makes sense for them to use because tabs don't scale there.
