1151253 - Chat ignores "display emoticons as graphics"

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Instant Messaging, defect)

Description

[Ralf Jung]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0 Iceweasel/37.0
Build ID: 20150401080140

Steps to reproduce:

* Uncheck "display emoticons as graphics" in the "Display" options
* Chat with someone, and say something like "^^ :) :D"


Actual results:

The character sequences are converted to graphical emoticons.


Expected results:

I disabled emoticons, so no conversion should happen.

I can disable emoticons by going to about:config and setting "messenger.options.emoticonsTheme" to "none". That's not discoverable though, and doesn't explain why the option mentioned above does not affect chat.

Comment 1

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

(In reply to Ralf Jung from comment #0)
> I can disable emoticons by going to about:config and setting
> "messenger.options.emoticonsTheme" to "none". That's not discoverable
> though, and doesn't explain why the option mentioned above does not affect
> chat.

FWIW there is no "why" to explain, it wasn't a decision that was made or anything. The chat code is shared with Instantbird, thus there's a shared pref (which you found). Instantbird allows you to change your emoticon theme for chat, Thunderbird does not. The mechanisms they use to create emoticons are completely different code paths (hence why the icons look completely different).

I'm not sure the best way to fix this bug...a few options are:
* Have the chat code check the Thunderbird pref (this is pretty much a non-starter, chat is shared code)
* Unify the emoticon creation between Thunderbird and chat (this is a lot of work...)
* Have flipping that pref in the UI change both preferences
* Add the UI to be able to switch emoticon themes for the chat code (or at least add a pref to disable chat emoticons). This could be near the pref to disable mail emoticons or in the chat options. Yes, this means you'd have to disable it in two places.

Comment 2

[Ralf Jung]

Thanks for the explanation! That is a "why", just not a usability-motivated one ;-) .

As an interim solution, anything that lets users configure chat emoticons in the UI is good enough, I would say. Of course, unifying emoticons sounds like "the right thing" in the long term.

I wonder what other interesting prefs there are that Thunderbird fails to expose... couldn't the configuration window be shared?

Comment 3

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

(In reply to Ralf Jung from comment #2)
> Thanks for the explanation! That is a "why", just not a usability-motivated
> one ;-) .

Yes, more of a history! Just wanted to let you know this wasn't done on purpose.

> As an interim solution, anything that lets users configure chat emoticons in
> the UI is good enough, I would say. Of course, unifying emoticons sounds
> like "the right thing" in the long term.

That would seem reasonable to me, but I'm not a UI person. I've needinfo-ed one of the TB UI people though. We'll see what he says. (FWIW, porting the UI I don't think would be too hard, but it was purposefully not ported, for some reason...)

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Patrick Cloke [:clokep] from comment #1)
> (In reply to Ralf Jung from comment #0)

> I'm not sure the best way to fix this bug...a few options are:

> * Have flipping that pref in the UI change both preferences

This seems the best (simplest) way forward to me.


(In reply to Patrick Cloke [:clokep] from comment #3)
> (FWIW, porting the
> UI I don't think would be too hard, but it was purposefully not ported, for
> some reason...)

The reasons was that UX (Blake) wanted to keep the chat prefs UI as simple as possible, and decided theme selection was add-on fodder.

Comment 5

[Josiah Bruner [:jsbruner]]

Adding the UI seems fine to me. In fact, I would argue that it's more than fine, it's ideal. I don't like emoticons, and having a hidden pref for it seems annoying to me. I don't know about Blake, but I would like to see more chat stuff/prefs in TB, so by all means, proceed. :)

Comment 6

[Jerod Lycett]

This is still affecting people.

Comment 7

[Jerod Lycett]

Is there any work on this occurring?

Comment 8

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

No work has been done on this, no. It seems that a decision was made above (that the preference in the Thunderbird UI should also change this preference), but it has not been implemented. I'm unsure how hard this would be, but I don't think it would be extremely difficult!

Comment 9

[Aashna]

Hey, is this a good first bug to take up? I'm interested!