Documentation Theme Sidebar 'forgets' setting in Firefox

Repeated many times in Firefox 16.0.2 on OSX 10.6.8

When a user changes the width of the sidebar pagetree either by clicking and dragging the sidebar, or toggling it with the button (div id="splitter-button") the sidebar resets itself when a new window, or tab are opened.

This behavior changes some by refreshing the page after updating the sidebar width, it then 'remembers' the setting for future pages.

When looking at the cookies, the first time the page is loaded, the 'doc-sidebar' cookie is 'undefined' until the page is loaded the second time.

I read up a bit on how the jQuery Splitter add-on used for the splitter works (http://methvin.com/splitter/) and it mentions that the browser will cache the setting - I suspect this is why it remembers the setting after refreshing the page a second time. Therefore, it seems that Firefox and Confluence's javascript interact with the cookie is buggy.

This feature was reported by our users as reliable before we upgraded to Confluence 4.3.2 (from 3.5.9), but now users find that they can not keep the sidebar hidden as they could in the previous Confluence version.

This behavior works as expected with Google's Chrome (23.0).

Steps to Reproduce

1. View a page in a Documentation Themed space
2. Drag the sidebar to the left to hide or shrink it
3. Open a link in a new tab/page
   • Observe that the sidebar is back to original width
4. Go back to the original page where the sidebar is shrunk and open a link, or refresh the page
   • Observe that the sidebar stays shrunk

Workaround

Refresh the page after minimising the sidebar, to 'save' the setting