127976 - shift-downarrow doesn't always select messages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 264526

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[John Richardson]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020204
BuildID:    2002020415



Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1.download a bunch of new messages
2.select a new message in the mail message title list (start of a thread is
usually where this happens)
3.hold down shift-downarrow


Actual Results:  Quite often, none or only a couple of the message titles 
will be selected.



Expected Results:  All message titles should be selected.

This happens very frequently with newly downloaded messages,
but almost never with older messages.  It is almost like 
some initialization is done that may expose a race condition
with the selection.

Redhat 7.1

Linux localhost 2.4.9-6 #1 Thu Oct 18 09:39:55 EDT 2001 i686 unknown

Comment 1

[John Richardson]

Reproducing this can be hard, if you are trying to reproduce it.  :(
It happens quite frequently when I manage my mailbox, using only
keyboard navigation.

It seems to have something to do with deleting a message and then
selecting some in the fashion mentioned above.  Also, it happens
more often the faster the downarrow is applied.  So, if I hold down
the downarrow, it is more likely to reproduce.  If I type 
shift+downarrow, downarrow, downarrow to select then it is 
more likely to work correctly.

Comment 2

[Olga]

Might not be related bug 126043 - it is about ocassional crash when use Shift to
select messages. Just in case.
Another bug 120388 about Shift. May be some scenarios will help to reproduce.

Comment 3

[John Richardson]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it isn't related to bug 126043

It may be related to bug 120388, but that appears to also be
using the mouse (I pretty much only use the keyboard).

Really, it is quite easy to reproduce just using the keyboard.
I'll try again tomorrow...

Comment 4

[John Richardson]

Well, I just enountered it a couple more times.  Both times it occured
when I :
  deleted two messages with the delete key
  right arrow to expand an unread thread
  shift downarrow to select that thread

I think the messages must be unread (and perhaps unselected).

Comment 5

[Olga]

I am still not successful with reproducing. Let's see may be others can do it.

Comment 6

[John Richardson]

OK, I just downloaded a couple hundred mail messages and found
this happens quite frequently (almost every time I use right arrow
to open a thread) and then shift down arrow to select the messages.

I did notice that:
 - reverse selection works (if I arrow down to the last message
   I can shift up arrow select the thread without problem
 - selection usually disappears after the first select.  So,
   right arrow (opens), shift (hold to select), down arrow, down
   arrow will cause selection to disappear.  If I up arrow back to the
   top of the thread, and repeat the selection attempt, it always works.

Sigh... I wish this were easier to reproduce.

Comment 7

[John Richardson]

Attachment: screenshot after selection

Notice that the yellow selection indicator is not on the last selection.
Also notice that the first message in the thread isn't selected (although
I did start the selection there, and it was selected until I hit downarrow
again).

Comment 8

[John Richardson]

I see this with 2002031008 (aka 0.9.9) as well.  

I'll have to try it a bit more, but I didn't notice it
on WinNT.  It could be a Linux-only problem.

Comment 9

[John Richardson]

Well, it happens on RC1 as well.  It may happen less frequently.  It does
seem like the yellow rectangle is just getting ahead of the selection.

Maybe my old PC (PII) is just too slow to keep up with selection.

Comment 10

[John Richardson]

OK, I've noticed this on NT4.0 SP6 w/ Mozilla 1.3 alpha as well.  It is less
frequent on NT, but with a large mailbox full of unread messages I see it nearly
every time I try to use the keyboard to select messages.

Comment 11

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

John Richardson, is this bug still a problem for you with current builds?

Comment 12

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

No response from reporter; =>WFM

Comment 13

[John Richardson]

(In reply to comment #12)
> No response from reporter; =>WFM

Woops.  I missed that last comment.  The problem still exists in mozilla 1.7 on
XP.  I haven't tried on Linux recently.

Comment 14

[John Richardson]

I just tried Thunderbird 0.8.  I don't see the behavior there, but I noticed
that the Options:Advanced:General Settings:Mark message read after displaying
for [ ] second(s) was turned on.  I'm guessing that if I turn this off I'll see
the same problem.

Comment 15

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I'm wondering whether the bug you've been seeing is bug 264526.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Well, I just enountered it a couple more times.  Both times it occured
> when I :
>   deleted two messages with the delete key
>   right arrow to expand an unread thread
>   shift downarrow to select that thread
> 
> I think the messages must be unread (and perhaps unselected).

If I select a single message just above a collapsed thread, the type shift-
uparrow to select two, then delete, then right-arrow to open the thread, I see 
this symptom.

As noted at the dupe, this appears to have been fixed in Moz 1.8a5.

Comment 16

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

No response from reporter; duping.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 264526 ***

Comment 17

[John Richardson]

Gotta pay attention to keep up here, sorry.

But yeah, it sounds like that fix would work.