How do I turn off Pinned Comment/Floating Comment Behavior?

[Jason]

Jira deployed a new feature that pins the new comment you are typing to the center of the screen, causing the new comment element to remain "stuck" in place while the rest of the page scrolls behind it. However, this blocks you from being able to read the previous comments when typing longer emails.

Please see this Loom video of the issue I'm describing: https://www.loom.com/share/51fa6d2f12a549f7a1ce80ea1a6f3169

I very strongly dislike this new feature. It's wildly unhelpful for me and disruptive to my workflow. (My teammates don't have behavior, yet; and I didn't see anything in Jira release notes about this; so I guess I'm being beta tested against maybe?) 

Does anyone know how to turn this off? I didn't see anything in my general settings.

I'm not a project admin, so I couldn't check other settings (but I did reach out to ask if they knew anything about this and whether there was a toggleable setting). 

Any guidance on this would be very appreciated. Thank you!

[Dan Breyen · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jason referring to the Can-we-disable-floating-comment-text-field post, it doesn't appear there is a way to disable that.  You may try contacting Atlassian Support to see if there still is a way to disable it.  Otherwise as Bill suggested, I would recommend voting for and watching these two work items:

JRACLOUD-84449 JRACLOUD-84439 

Hope that helps.

[Jason]

Thank you kindly for the feedback, @Dan Breyen! Very helpful insights.

My company admin pointed out that someone else reported the same issue a few days ago: JRACLOUD-95841. Glad I'm not the only one.
I will open up into a rant here in the hopes that the Jira Product Management Team sees this message.

Maybe this would have been better implemented as a user-level setting (something we can individually decide to turn on or off, as outlined on this Jira work item: JRACLOUD-84449), instead of pushing it out as the default behavior for all.

This change may be helpful for some clients, but given the amount of technical writing I perform daily, it is counterproductive. My process involves constantly cycling between the draft I’m writing and previous comments—whether my own internal notes, engineer notes, or client responses—so blocking any amount of that context interrupts my ability to work efficiently. My preference is that there should never be a floating comment box.

As implemented, it feels like it was deployed without sufficient testing and represents a regression in user experience. The previous behavior was significantly better, and I see no clear need for this change.

As shown in my example video, this new feature obstructs my view of other comments while I’m drafting longer-form messages. This is a major problem, as I rely on detailed note-taking during investigations and on writing client-facing updates in nearly every ticket.

Jira team member Vishal described this as a deliberate design choice, but I strongly disagree that it improves the user experience. In practice, it removes critical context and directly hinders my workflow.

I urge the Jira team to roll this back as soon as possible, as it negatively affects nearly every ticket I work on.

If anyone else is having a similarly negative experience with the sticky/pinned/floating comment box, please go vote for that Bug ticket: JRACLOUD-95841

WORKAROUND (see timestamp 1:05 of my video example):

1. Write an internal comment,
2. Save,
3. Then edit again to get the old behavior to appear.

This is inefficient and not a sustainable solution (and who knows if it'll work indefinitely), but it may help others in the meantime.

Thanks y'all!