RSS Feed
Mar 12

Safari’s offscreen menu behavior

Posted on Sunday, March 12, 2006 in Mac

I just encountered a weird behavior - if not bug - in Safari. I was on a page with a navigational menu near the top, and I was scrolled near the bottom, but the keyboard focus was still on the dropdown widget. Hitting the spacebar produced this menu sprouting from the top edge of the screen.

weird menu

Obviously, Safari’s just displaying the menu where it should be displayed, only that location isn’t on the screen, so it’s rendering it as accurately as possible. But it’s weird and unexpected behavior, which is the nemesis of UI developers everywhere. What should happen instead? Should the window scroll upwards to show the menu’s origin? Should the menu have lost focus when it moved offscreen? Should hitting the spacebar to activate an offscreen control just result in an “alert sound”?