224575 - Field sort "intelligence" (ascend vs. descend)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[L A Walsh]

User-Agent:       lynx 5.5 (vision impaired version)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030916

It would be a nice feature -- when I click on a field header, if
it looked where I am *currently* (is scrollbar at bottom or top of
email folder) and take a "cue" as to sort "ascending or descending"
from the current position and/or sort order.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have messages sorted by order received, descending; (with newest messages 
at top of screen)
2. Click on date.  (note initial inconsistent search order)
3.

Actual Results:  
search order is made ascending (whereas before it was descending)

Expected Results:  
(Desired results) -- for items like thread sort, date and received
order, (having a temporal component), a sort on a new field should
take it's hint from the sort order of the previously selected
'temporal' component.  I.e. -- if I had messages sorted such that
newer messages would appear at the top, sorting on a new field that
had a temporal component would use the same ordering (ascending vs.
descending) that the list was previously sorted in). 

I believe this falls under the area of "least surprise" to the user.

I'd guess with items that have a alphabetic ordering (subject, to, sender, 
threads), it might be nice to take the same hinting if the previous
field was alphabetically sorted, take the asc.v.desc value into the
new sort order.

Note -- for threads this would have the effect of threads being
sorted by 'alpha' (if it came from  an 'alpha' field (like subject))
or by date-time if it came from a field having a 'temporal value' (like
date, order arrived).

Just might provide a more 'intuitive feel' to the interface (even though,
I acknowledge, it would't be rigidly predictable).

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[L A Walsh]

Has been fixed for some time...*sigh*

Comment 3

[Kevin Brosnan]

We don't know what fixed this worksforme