1060911 - Recipient input fields: can no longer select email address with a single click, because contact icons were removed

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1527547

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Alan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; BOIE9;ENUS; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Steps to reproduce:

In an open, addressed email, left click on "To:".




Actual results:

New (bad) behavior: the address is not selected; instead, the dropdown box is activated.

The source of the problem: the button that used to hold the "To:" label was apparently removed in v.31.



Expected results:

Old (good) behavior (prior to v.31): the address should be selected.  The old behavior allowed selection of an address (e.g., to type over it) with a single click.  That was good behavior.  The new behavior is much inferior.  You either have to triple click on the address, or (right click, move mouse to SelectAll, left click).

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away until Aug 10)]

I don't think anything changed there, maybe you had an add-on that provided such functionality in tb24?

Comment 2

[Alan]

My bad: it was not clicking *on* the "To:", but right next to it. Just before the email address, there used to be a tiny person icon for this: clicking on the icon would select the address field.  It is no longer there, as of v.31.

Sorry for my memory glitch:  I had to find an older copy of Thunderbird to examine what the interface actually looked like.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

This regression makes the entire traditional clumsy one-row-per-recipient design even worse:
Bug 867166 (New_Composer_UI) removed the contact icons, afasik without any prior examination or explanation. Which also annilated, again without any discussion, plans for more useful recipient icons:

Bug 284648 - Address field icons should actually mean something
Most importantly, that bug suggests that double-clicking on a contact icon should allow editing the properties of that contact (iirc, such functionality is found in certain versions of outlook/oe), which imo makes a highly useful and efficient link between the recipient area and the contact in address book.

Bug 313476 - address field shows card instead of mailing list icon when there's a mailing list in it
Bug 21438 - Should display newsgroup icon in compose window addressing panel

(Bug 181886 - [RFE] Open Address window if "card" icon in compose window address field is clicked)
(Bug 81672 - UI at To: field to open address book directly)

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I'm much in favor of keeping the contact icons along comment 3 (especially to allow in-place editing of the contact properties, e.g. correction of name, email address etc.).

Lacking that, as a minimal fix for this bug, we could consider offering the same behaviour as in FF URL bar:
- first single click anywhere in the recipient selects the entire recipient (FF: entire URL)
- second single click (after short pause) places cursor in click position (FF: in URL).

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away until Aug 10)]

This change is from bug 906264 / bug 867161 and whatever the windows one was.

Comment 6

[Björn Kahl]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #4)
> Lacking that, as a minimal fix for this bug, we could consider offering the
> same behaviour as in FF URL bar:
> - first single click anywhere in the recipient selects the entire recipient
> (FF: entire URL)
> - second single click (after short pause) places cursor in click position
> (FF: in URL).

Please don't do that.  FF selecting the whole URL on first click is for me the most annoying UI design bug in FF.  The URL bar is editable text and should behave so: Clicking onto editable text should enable editing by placing and activating the cursor.

Regarding Thunderbird, FF's behavior would even worse, since it conflicts with the most likely reason to ever point to a *recipient* line: Fixing the address and/or full name.

The right behavior should be:
- First single click: place cursor at mouse pointer position and activate for text editing.
- Double click: select word under cursor and activate for text editing.
- Triple click: select whole content of recipient line for copy/paste and text editing.

The rational is, that there is usually no need to select the whole content of a recipient line (except maybe to remove a recipient from the mail), but that it is quite plausible to need to fix an address or to copy parts of it, e.g. the full name, into the mail one is composing.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I have fixed this in bug 1527547 (which is still applicable for current release version 68.5.0):
Single click on a recipient or tab into recipient will auto-select that recipient for user's convenience (precursory pill style), allowing fast removal, cut/copy, or overwrite. Things will get even better when aleca's bug 440377 (recipient pills) arrives on release channel.

Having the recipient icon back (or some other way of getting from recipient to the respective address book entry) would require another bug.

(In reply to Björn Kahl from comment #6)

The rational is, that there is usually no need to select the whole content
of a recipient line (except maybe to remove a recipient from the mail), but
that it is quite plausible to need to fix an address or to copy parts of it,
e.g. the full name, into the mail one is composing.

Well, as laid out above, there's a range of useful actions on a selected recipient. Users will typically type a recipient only once in their Thunderbird life, so that's usually the only time where manual corrections might occur, then after that it'll autocomplete to the correct address forever.