1206959 - Implement pref/warning when opening more than ~100 tabs by accidentally pressing ENTER with many messages selected (ux-error-prevention against accidentally opening hundreds of message tabs)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Robert Miles]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150826023504

Steps to reproduce:

I selected about 4000 messages, with the intent of moving them from one local folder to another.  I tried to tell Earlybird which folder to move them to.


Actual results:

A clicking error opened all those message, each in a separate tab.  I've now spent over an hour closing tabs.  No crash or error message.


Expected results:

I should have seen a request for which folder to move them to.  Could you add either a button for closing all the tabs showing messages, or a way for the user to specify a limit on how many tabs a user can open at once instead of getting an error message and no tabs opened?

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Robert, can you tell us more about the "clicking error" which actually opened all the selected messages?
There's no easy way to miss "Move To" and end up with "Open":
- msg context menu does NOT yet have "open" command
- in main menu, commands are far apart
So the only way to open multiple selected messages seems to be pressing Enter on keyboard, which looks like an unlikely "error" to me.

A command which effects "Close All Tabs" already exists: on tabs context menu, choose "Close other tabs" which means "close all tabs except this one". Easy, and not too hard to find...

That said, I wouldn't mind a hidden pref which asks before, say, opening more than 100 messages.

Comment 2

[Robert Miles]

I didn't notice just what caused the problem.  It might have been pressing Enter for all I remember.

The "Close All Tabs" command may be an adequate solution if you tell me how to find the tabs context menu.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Robert Miles from comment #2)
> I didn't notice just what caused the problem.  It might have been pressing
> Enter for all I remember.
> 
> The "Close All Tabs" command may be an adequate solution if you tell me how
> to find the tabs context menu.

The command is labelled "Close Other tabs" which is virtually the same as "Close all tabs" except current tab will survive. Right-click on the tab header ___/'''''''\___ . Does that help?

Comment 4

[Robert Miles]

That looks adequate; I just tried it with only two active tabs, and it closed one.

Comment 5

[Matt]

@Aleca, I would think this would not be something we would implement. Your opinion?

Comment 6

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Yeah, I don't think it's something we want to implement as we can't assume how many tabs the user wants to open, and when "too many" is considered a mistake.
If we do that, then we would need to implement the same logic and warning for when the user closes all the tabs.
This is a WONTFIX for me.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I think we should just implement a warning prompt "Are you sure that you want to open 100 messages?" as a matter of ux-error-prevention against cases like reporter's where he accidentally opened 4000(!) selected messages by mistake. It's highly unlikely that anyone in their right mind would deliberately do that. As we're not blocking any action, the threshold wouldn't matter much if it's high enough, so could even hard-code that (for which 100 sounds good to me). I mean - what's next after you open 100 or 1000 messages? A working day has 8 hours. If you work all day doing nothing else than replying emails at a rate of 5 minutes per email, you might work off 96 messages. I don't think there's anybody who would volunteer to dig around between more than 100 tabs, so it's pretty safe to assume a user error and just warn against that.

Comment 8

[Matt]

Apart from the inconvenience of clicking the wrong thing and opening that many messages, how hard is it to right click a tab and select close all to recover.

I would see the interruption of a warning as more detrimental than the opening delay, but I have been using since V2 and have only once some years ago opened tabs by accident, so really neither option is going to interrupt me. I just don't use tab's or windows much at all.

Comment 9

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Matt from comment #8)

Apart from the inconvenience of clicking the wrong thing and opening that many messages

That's the key point. 1,000 messages or more may take considerable time to open (16 minutes if they take a second each), lots of flickering, tab chaos and non-responsive UI, which will be highly annoying as an accident. Hence this bug is about ux-error-prevention rather than ux-error-recovery.

how hard is it to right click a tab and select close all to recover.

That's error-recovery, and again, it depends.

• As this bug shows, not all users know how to recover from this error by using "close all tabs except current tab".
• Furthermore, we don't know if perhaps they already had 25 carefully selected tabs open with various messages they really wanted to work on or to keep open as a reminder for something (as opposed to the 1,000 they opened accidentally). So to close the 1,000 efficiently, you also need to close all of your previous tabs which were important, and there is no easy way to get them back short of writing them down and searching for the messages again to re-open them one by one.

I would see the interruption of a warning as more detrimental

I don't think so. How often in a day do you need to open 100+ messages in one go? As I tried to explain, it looks impossible to actually work on more than 100 messages per day at a rate of 5 mins/message, so I am still failing to see why someone would regularly open 100 messages at once? For anything faster than that, what's the point of opening instead of just browsing the message list? I cannot imagine anyone opening messages for more than a day's workload, which would cause pretty much of a tab overload (and possibly performance penalties).

than the opening delay, but I have been using since V2 and have only once some years ago opened tabs by accident, so really neither option is going to interrupt me. I just don't use tab's or windows much at all.

Which just proves my point - we are yet to find someone who actually wants to open 100 messages in one go, so having a warning on that unlikely scenario is not going to be detrimental to anyone, but it can prevent major annoyance and loss of time and tabs history from accidental "Enter" with large selection >= 100 messages.