www.ubuntu.com has horizontal scroll bar

It seems to me that virtually every website I ever visit has a vertical scroll bar. The only exception I can think of is google. I don't understand what "grave usability problem" this presents. My default and max resolution is 1024x768 (a small screen i know). I find horizontal scroll bars quite annoying especially if it means having both a vertical and horizontal scroll bar. If there were not vertical scroll bars on websites I would have to click through to new pages much much more often.

Could you please explain further why this is a problem for you?

For now I am marking this as incomplete as it is not immediately clear why it is an issue.

I believe the era means the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the page, not the one running down the side. I would hypothesize that Firefox defaults to a narrow window in the case that the user has a low resolution monitor.

ahh that makes sense. I would imagine it is not the easiest thing to make default window sizes dependent on screen resolution. This would solve most problems like this but probably requires more work than the usability gained from implementing.

I think we can close this bug against Ubuntu Website since there isn't actually anything wrong with the website. They have surely taken into account the screen resolutions they want to support when they designed the site layout.

I will leave the bug as Incomplete for now. The changes you are requesting aren't really a bug and require more discussion, which should be done on an appropriate mailing list or forum. http://www.ubuntu.com/support/community/mailinglists might be a good start for determining which mailing list to use.
I might suggest the following list: ubuntu-mozillateam-bugs - Ubuntu Mozilla bugs
https://lists.ubuntu.com/#Bug+Lists
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-mozillateam-bugs

After receiving feedback from the list, please let us know what they say (or post a link to the mailing list log for that thread).
Thank you.

The problem is not with Firefox, it's fine. Marking as Invalid for firefox-3.0

Yes, my bad, the issue is with the horizontal scroll bar.

I take exception with the explanation that the designers "have surely taken into account the screen resolutions they want to support when they designed the site layout". They haven't, but should take into account the default screen resolution of the most recent release of Ubuntu out of the box with a reasonably large screen; that is precisely the bug here.

> I would hypothesize that Firefox defaults to a narrow window
> in the case that the user has a low resolution monitor.

My monitor is not low resolution by any reasonable definition. This is a dual 1680x1050 wide-screen LCD running at the maximum resolution. The window size is fine as such, I would not want Firefox to be any wider than it is.

If you still think a mailing list is a better place for bug reports than the bug database, would the ubuntu-website mailing list be appropriate? Looks like they don't really use the bug tracker much (judging from the open bugs in https://bugs.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-website at least).

Hi,

The bug tracker is the appropriate place to report bugs about the website. However, I don't think this is a bug. The website is 888 pixels wide, which is perfectly standard and should not result in horizontal scrolling on any screen with a basic resolution such as 1024x768. It certainly doesn't on my machine.

Many other websites are considerably wider. For example, http://www.bbc.co.uk/, which looks like it is 974 pixels wide.

In the case of your screenshot, it seems that you are using dual screens, each of which is extremely narrow. Perhaps you could clarify the setup.

For the above reasons I'm closing the bug. If your real objection is that the website has a fixed width, then that is something which has been discussed a fair amount in the past and was a conscious choice by the webdesigners. Reopening that discussion is possible, but you should certainly use the ubuntu-website list for that.

To clarify, when I say "They have surely taken into account the screen resolutions they want to support when they designed the site layout," I mean that if you were to maximize firefox, the website would appear normally on your screen. Anything smaller than a maximized window is a matter of personal preference. Mathew has done an excellent job in explaining. If you are concerned about the static width of the website, then please do say so, though as Matthew has mentioned, it has already been discussed a fair amount.

The default window size of Firefox is too narrow to display a page which is 888 pixels wide. The default window size for Firefox on my system is 820 pixels wide and 971 pixels high (excluding the window manager's border, window title bar, etc).

It's an annoyance to have to maximize or resize the window in order to view the contents of the site. It would be nice and thoughtful to make sure the site requires a maximum of 820 pixels of width; ideally, of course, it should be useful regardless of browser window size, and avoid design models which do not work well even with a small screen.

I'm not saying this is a catastrophic problem, and I will not reopen the bug if you mark it as invalid again.

The screen shot is from the left monitor; I cropped it because the right monitor is just a blank desktop with nothing on it. The fact that I have dual monitors is not really pertinent to the discussion; the screen shot shows what a single-monitor user would see on a 1680x1050 display.