Sidebar (left navbar, nav bar) Sensitivity

Ture Hoefner September 11, 2020

Did sensitivity of the sidebar (left navbar) recently change?  If so, please undo that change.

This week I've noticed that I cannot briefly pass my mouse/cursor over the left side of a wiki page because it pops open the navbar.  This has not been a problem before this week.  Maybe there is some configuration I don't know about, maybe someone on my team did it?

I am opening/closing the sidebar constantly now.  A few times a day I intentionally open the sidebar and 900 times a day it accidentally opens.

It is so bad that I try to remember to move my mouse off of a browser wiki page by going down and around instead of out the left side. 

It's sub-second hover time to pop open the sidebar and after about the 100th time, usually mid-morning, I'm getting pretty worked up over this.  Make it stop... please.

 

7 answers

3 votes
Alexandru Diacov
I'm New Here
I'm New Here
Those new to the Atlassian Community have posted less than three times. Give them a warm welcome!
March 15, 2024

Is there a way to disable this behavior from the settings?
I have multiple open windows side by side and moving mouse around makes this sidebars open, which is unconformable.  

 

Konrad Morawski
I'm New Here
I'm New Here
Those new to the Atlassian Community have posted less than three times. Give them a warm welcome!
September 3, 2024

I'm using Vivaldi, and a workaround that sort of fixes it for me is opening a side panel in the browser (Vivaldi provides these out of the box). It does steal a bit of screen estate, but I make it as narrow as possible and the resulting experience is still way better, because at least it doesn't dynamically expand nor obscure the content of the page. If your browser of choice supports side panels - possibly with some extension? - it could be worth a try.

1 vote
Ture Hoefner September 22, 2020

The problem w/ the Confluence nav-bar behavior is that the mouse-off out the left side of the page is not being handled.  

If you mouse-over the left-nav bar and then mouse-off out the RIGHT side of the left-nav bar then it does an open/close.

If you mouse-over the left-nav bar and then mouse-off out the LEFT side of the left-nav bar then it does not CLOSE the nav-bar as you leave.  It leaves it open.  IMO, this is a bug.

See BitBucket for a left-nav bar that is behaving.  The way they did it is to put the left-nav bar about an inch into the page, away from the left edge of the browser window.  That probably makes it easier for them to use the same event handler for leaving the nav bar w/ a mouse drag out both left and right sides.

The bug in Confluence is that a drag out of the left side of the nav-bar does NOT close it.  When you drag out the left side of the browser to leave the browser then that pops the left nav open and LEAVES it open.

 

Here is BitBucket:

BB_nav.png

 

Here is Confluence.  There is NO real estate left of the nav bar so whatever event happens when a mouse exits the browser page off the left side is what needs to be hooked up to the "close" function.

The wiki I'm looking at has no real estate to the left of the nav bar.   I don't know if that is a config setting.  In any case, a Confluence site can render pages w/ no real estate to the left of the nav bar so the event for leaving the page through the left side of the page needs to be wired up.

Confluence_nav.png

1 vote
Ture Hoefner September 11, 2020

oh god... now I went back to work after my post and immediately got like 3 unintentional openings of the sidebar.

Please do not open the sidebar for a mouse hover over the left side of the browser window.  That is a huge target and I'm hitting it constantly all day long.  I am, literally, going insane right now.

Thanks.

1 vote
Ture Hoefner September 11, 2020

Hi @Andrew Dildy : thanks for replying!

Yes, that is the behavior.  When the sidebar is collapsed:

I decide I'm done looking at a Confluence page in my browser and I drag the cursor, using my mouse, out of the browser window that I have so I can do my next thing. 

My habit is to have Confluence in a browser on my right-most monitor so I drag my mouse out of the browser window through the left side and as it passes over the sidebar (ANYWHERE on the sidebar from top to bottom) the sidebar expands/opens.  It's like a fraction of a second that the mouse is over the sidebar and it expands.  I don't even pause over the sidebar, I drag the cursor out the left side of the browser window and that is popping open the sidebar.

OMG, it just happened now when I moved my mouse to see where the mouse cursor was.  It was on a browser on one of our wiki pages.  I did a quick circle, like 'where are you cursor?' and the sidebar opened in the browser where my cursor had been hovering.

It is like an electric shock every time it happens... it takes up a 3rd of the page and must be closed so I can still read the page while I'm working... so I can't just ignore it.

Please get rid of the event handler that is reacting to cursor movements across the sidebar.  It's unnecessary, the widget for expanding it with a click is obvious.  People can use that.

0 votes
Ture Hoefner September 25, 2020

Thanks!!!!!

0 votes
Andrew Dildy
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 24, 2020

Hi Ture,

My apologies for the delay response here, we've been discussing this issue internally.

First off, we're aware of the issue you identified above with the mousing off behavior.  It's absolutely a bug and we're working on a fix.

Secondly, we hear you that the flyout behavior is too easily triggered and feels jumpy.  We're planning on increasing the flyout delay slightly which will hopefully lead to less unintentional openings.

I'll be sure to post an update here to let you know when these changes have shipped!

Konrad Morawski
I'm New Here
I'm New Here
Those new to the Atlassian Community have posted less than three times. Give them a warm welcome!
September 3, 2024

Is the work close to completion by now? I'm experiencing the exact same issue, and it is indeed very annoying.

To be precise, it's a scenario pretty much like the one described by @adiacov  - an Atlassian page open on a display/monitor on the right, I move the cursor to a monitor on the left, the sidebar reacts by expanding and never collapsing, obscuring part of the Atlassian page.

Simon Keller
I'm New Here
I'm New Here
Those new to the Atlassian Community have posted less than three times. Give them a warm welcome!
September 17, 2024
0 votes
Andrew Dildy
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 11, 2020

Hi Ture,

The sidebar should only expand on hover if

  1. It is collapsed (see screenshot of collapsed sidebar).
  2. You mouse over the leftmost 20px of browser window (anything to the left of the line pointed to by the red arrow in the screenshot).

Does this match the behavior you are experiencing?

Screen Shot 2020-09-11 at 9.23.03 AM.png

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events