549984 - Tools menu on Mac only has Account Settings if Write window open

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 638985

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Neville Hillyer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100216 Thunderbird/3.0.2

All drop-down Tools menu items, except Account Settings, are missing if a Write (compose) window is open. Other windows appear not to be affected by this quirk.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

I believe what you mean is that the Tools menu in the Compose window has only four items in it: Mail & Newsgroups, Address Book, Account Settings (after a separator), and Options. Is this correct?
If so, I think this is by design, although I don't know the exact reasoning behind it. Do you have any specific recommendations for what should still be in the Tools menu?

Comment 2

[Neville Hillyer]

Attachment: Truncated tools menu

Comment 3

[Neville Hillyer]

Attachment: Normal tools menu

No - attached you will see my truncated and normal tools menus.

I can see no reason to remove items from the menu although some may be greyed out.

Unless there is likely to be a malfunction I would prefer to keep most items active most of the time.

Comment 4

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

Hmm, the four items I mentioned should never need to be disabled, even, much less removed -- at least not on Windows.

Can you reproduce in Thunderbird Safe Mode (https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode)?

Comment 5

[Neville Hillyer]

Identical behaviour in safe mode.

Comment 6

[Neville Hillyer]

Can anybody confirm this on another Mac?

Comment 7

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Can anybody confirm this on another Mac?

I'm seeing the same behavior. Easy workaround is to switch the front window to the three pane one. This might be by design. Philor do you know why it's in that state ?

Comment 8

[Neville Hillyer]

Is this going to be fixed?

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter, 

do you still see this problem when using a current version of thunderbird? 

And if you do not, please close bug report by changing resolution to worksforme

Comment 10

[Neville Hillyer]

Bug still exists on TB 3.1.17.

I have not yet upgraded to TB 3.1.18 but I can do so if you think it will be different.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

3.1 is EOL in a couple months (and nothing more is being fixed there), so we are interested in whether this occurs in a current version, eg 9 or 10.

bug is Mac-only?

Comment 12

[Neville Hillyer]

There is a considerable rump of Mac users who, for various reasons, are unlikely to upgrade beyond their very serviceable Power PCs. I have several of these very flexible Macs which cannot use the latest versions of TB. I will probably keep them going until about 2020 by which time I hope I will have completed my transition to Ubuntu.

I do not have any Intel Macs.

I do not know if this is a Mac only bug.

I would prefer this bug report to remain open unless/until it is fixed.

Comment 13

[Joe Sewell]

Confirmed in 3.1.18.

Cannot confirm in later versions, being part of the afore-mentioned "rump" that is increasingly considered ''mox nix''.

Removing cc.

Comment 14

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Whether it's by design would require that there be an actual design. There are things in the tools menu for the 3pane that do not apply to the compose window, and things that don't care what window is up, and things which belong in the Window menu on Mac.

Step one, not platform-specific, would be to look at everything in the 3pane tools menu, and determine which things are not 3pane-specific and should appear in every window.

Step two would be to determine which of those belong in the Window menu on Mac.

Step three is where it gets hard, because the step two answer will probably be "all of them" but extensions hook the tools menu, and a completely empty tools menu on Mac just waiting for an extension to stick something in there is even more likely to result in people thinking something's wrong.

Comment 16

[Neville Hillyer]

It has taken about 10 years to decide that this bug of mine is a duplicate of a newer bug.

I have mentioned previously that duplicating older bugs to newer ones is unfortunate. I would much prefer a presumption that, unless there are very good reasons, bugs should always be duplicated to the older version. In exceptional circumstances any duplication to a newer bug should contain a detailed explanation for the unusual action. Do others agree and if so how can this be opened for wider discussion?