204004 - Pane layout options make poor use of modern screens

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Dave Abrahams]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)
Build Identifier: Mozilla 1.4a

It should be possible to display the message preview pane next to the others 
so that it takes up the entire vertical area of the window

Modern screens are wider than they are tall, and are getting larger/higher 
resolution every day.  Why do GUI designers think it's a good idea to split 
these screens horizontally?  When you maximize a window and split the screen 
horizontally, you get a couple of short, wide panes.  It becomes difficult to 
read text that stretches end-to-end because you lose track of which line 
you're reading as your eyes scan back at a line break.  You're left unable to 
see all of any document with more than one paragraph because the pane is too 
short.

It's not just Mozilla; see MS Outlook for another example.  Even Outlook 
Express lets me arrange my screen like this, where the left pane has mail 
folders and newsgroups, the middle one has message headers, and the right one 
is the message preview (I'd use it but it crashes for me when used with IMAP):

  +----+----------+--------------+
  |    |          |              |
  |    |          |              |
  |    |          |              |
  |    |          |              |
  |    |          |              |
  |    |          |              |
  |    |          |              |
  +----+----------+--------------+
  
This arrangement lets me comfortably read most of any reasonably-sized message 
and also get a sense of the various conversations in a newsgroup or mail 
folder.

Please don't take the frustrated tone of this message to heart; I'm sure 
Mozilla is wonderful, but I've been searching in vain for a mail/news client 
that can handle my needs and it's hard to see several otherwise good 
candidates fail me due to such a trivial design choice.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Stuart Summerville]

Thsi bug would appear to address your issue....

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89941

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

This feature has been implemented, in Mozilla (1.8xx) and TB; I can't find the 
bug, but it's been in the past few months.