1354922 - Distracting = Annoying coloured smileys in subject lines since update to 52.0 [It's a feature: EmojiOneMozilla.ttf] [Original problem SOLVED by WORKAROUND - added note re. possible low security risk due to lax font file interpretation]

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170323105023

Steps to reproduce:

Upgrade from 45.8.0 to 52.0.

And I regret that. As I have done so often in recent times.


Actual results:

Unicode smileys that were sufficiently annoying in 45.8.0, are now even more annoying: In color, finally = much more distracting.

This accelerates my heartbeat (from adrenaline) and thereby shortens my lifetime.


Expected results:

Thunderbird should - at maximum - keep the old way of displaying smileys in b/w.
Or offer a checkbox to get back to this behavior.

AND it should offer another checkbox to suppress Smiley-and-Emoji-Unicode-characters in e-Mail subject lines alltogether. I DON'T want an inbox where the least important messages blink and shine in the most colourful, most distracting way!

AND Thunderbird should a checkbox to bring back a proper menu bar, remove the three-lines-extra-search-and-click-here-if-you-want-a-menu-funciton,
AND to conform to system wide selections of font size, window title color and font size, menu color and font size, DO AWAY WITH its own inventions of colours for a separator line within menus etc. pp.

There have been very nice GUI design guides out since the days of Apple Macintosh (at least), and there had been a reason for that, and people who wrote them (and did some underlying research) were very highly regarded in the field.

If I want something that looks completely different from a standard, efficiently usable program window - I can still sketch something full of phantasy, and put that image somewhere on the screen. I don't need (nor want) an e-mail client (nor a browser, nor Windows 8 ... 10) to do *that* job.

---------------------------

Hello Thunderbird Team.

Thank you for your work on the e-mail client. I generally appreciate that it is available.

But in the last months or years, you have sadly given in to the general hype of adopting non-standard inefficient user interfaces, like hiding menu bars behind icons of three lines, even though I'm NOT on a mobile phone without keyboard here, and even though this is a mail client, not a chrome-plated-shiny-LOOK-HERE-I-HAVE-THE-LARGEST-BLINKING-PROLO-SUV thingie. (Same applies to firefox and the mozilla website etc. - haven't the guys in your marketing dept. ever considered adding larger photos there?!?!)

Well. Now, you have apparently "improved" your client to display some smiley emoticons sent with ebay status info mails in colour.

As a consequence, they can hardly be discerned any more (different line art is much more distinctive than small colour dots in large colour circular shapes) - AND, what really bothers me: they're distracting. Annoyingly distracting.

Apparently, the update interprets some UTF code in a "better" way to bring the colours. May be fine for those who like some distracting color dots that mean absolutely nothing, or who have become so indifferent by now that even a yellow red full-saturation-color-blob would not grab their attention.

This new problem is NOT related to any change in what ebay is sending, because it started today, affecting messages that are some days old already, and had been displayed in a different way before.

I'm writing this up as a bug report, because:
(a) I can't *find* on your overloaded large-photo-javascript-marketing-blinky website any contact address,
(b) I really think it's bugs when the user interface becomes more and more distractive and less standards- or user-choice-system-settings observing (missing menu bar, incompatibility with standard system settings re. size of menu highlights, newly added different menu color style etc.)

I think that sooner or later all this will make me go back to pine. Or stick with some version of Thunderbird that still had a usable UI. I can live *very* well without the newest features, when I may have a *standards observing* efficient UI, not a thousand new places to search old things, and no distraction for no reason.

And I had been SO happy about the announcement some time ago, that Thunderbird would only receive security updates, and no more feature changes... Couldn't it be kept like this?

Thanks again, for having maintained a great e-mail client. At, and up to, some point back in time... ;-)

P.S.: "Theme Font & Size Changer" does not help, and disabling "Show graphical emoticons" in the configuration dialog does not help either.

Kindest regards, Joerg

Comment 1

[[e-mail]]

I've just found out how to get a proper windows title bar and a menu bar back:

Options - Config options - about:config
mail.tabs.drawInTitlebar
change setting from true to false

Still, the menus have separator lines in the wrong style and the wrong colour,
but at least you don't have to look at that as long as they're not open.
And at least, the highlight now fits to the height of the menu bar and is not too large any more.

Doesn't fix (all) the bug(s) reported above, but it reduces the annoyances by one, at least... :-)

Thanks and kind regards, Joerg

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

I've just found this older "error" which has (regrettably!!!!) been marked as "solved":

https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Thunderbird/Emoji-in-the-subject-line-displayed-black-and-white/td-p/1369381

"Emoji in the subject line displayed black and white SOLVED"


Quote (from the last response in that thread):

> patrick_cork
> New User
‎> 02-03-2017 06:18 AM
> 
> Ok... I see more and more newsletters using emojis in their subject lines, even "serious" ones, so it seems worth considering.
> 
> Also, emojis (in color) are not exclusive to HTML, but they are defined as being "colorful"
> by Unicode http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#def_emoji so I believe the current rationale can not hold in the future.

Well, it is naturally clear that this beginning:

"I see more and more newsletters using emojis in their subject lines, even "serious" ones,..." 

could have had only one truly *reasonable* ending:

"...so lets try everything and more to protect the brains of our beloved users from that $@*#!"

:-)

Oh, and if this new "feature" (=annoyingly distracting coloured unicode emojis in the inbox)
really has been the "solution" to an "error" - then I guess that the code related to that
solution should still be very well known. 

So... could there please be another "solution" added, that would enable users to turn the
inbox colour bombardement OFF again? :-)  :-)  :-)

(Hope you can understand my emoticons above w/o Unicode & colour support.)

Kindest regards!

Joerg

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Attachment: Screenshot of messages with coloured icons.

You're referring to something like this, right?

I've noticed them, Richard, since when do we do these? Does this have anything to do with bug 638335?

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

(In reply to [e-mail] from comment #1)
> Still, the menus have separator lines in the wrong style and the wrong
> colour,

This is bug 1354217.

(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+2) from comment #3)
> I've noticed them, Richard, since when do we do these? Does this have
> anything to do with bug 638335?

This was for XP and Linux. Win 7 already supported coloured fonts. I think there must be a toolkit change which fully enabled it.

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

Two more ameliorations:

The plugin "Classicish Add-on Manager" brings the add-on manager into a dialog window.
So that it will NOT overlap the main area of the program, where you would usually like to see the effects of any options that you might change for some modules within the add-ons manager.

The plugin "Theme Font & Size Changer" lets you chose a reasonable font size.

The "Microbird" plugin/theme brings back lightly striped "paper" behind the inbox,
and the correct separator lines in the menus.
(And a more classic look than would be necessary - even Borland style buttons in the dialogs... Hmm - hmm...
 But also, faster and more easily discernable buttons in the main toolbar etc.)

It would be nice if the latter could be coombined with the "CustomizeMyBird" plugin -
in order to get more easily comprehensible, clearer separations between the tabs.

NOW, how do we get the toolbar on top of the tabs in Thunderbird?



And of course, while it does not completely offset the distraction from coloured emojis in the inbox -
at least it *ameliorates* the distraction caused by these. Because the "Microbird" them counterbalances
them by colours in many outer spots, so they're at least not as distractive as they were in a mostly gray environment.


So I'd still be happy if the "Display Unicode Emoticons in [ ] colour [ ] b/w" selection could still be incloded somewhere.
Even if it were down in about:config :-)

Kind regards, Joerg

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+2) from comment #3)
> Created attachment 8856270 [details]
> Screenshot of messages with coloured icons.
> 
> You're referring to something like this, right?
> 
> I've noticed them, Richard, since when do we do these? Does this have
> anything to do with bug 638335?

Yes, exactly.

>>> Thank you (both) for your very quick reply. It's absolutely nice to see that. <<<

My reporting it as a "bug" was semi-humorous, and in the meantime I've learnt that:

"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

(This refers to the href above in my comment 2).

Comment 7

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to Richard Marti (:Paenglab) from comment #4)
> (In reply to [e-mail] from comment #1)
> > Still, the menus have separator lines in the wrong style and the wrong
> > colour,
> 
> This is bug 1354217.

>>> Thank you, too, for your fast response. <<<

Yes, I can confirm. It looks exactly like that.

Now, after I added the "Microbird" theme plugin, I've got "correct" menu separators back.
(And, more "classic" appearance than I asked for - but this Microbird theme hurts much less
 than the look of the menus depicted in the screenshot you have referenced.)

Please note: I'm observing all this on Win 7 64bit with "Windows classic" appearance,
             i.e. Window titles, Menus etc. still appear similar to W2k / NT,
             and not like Win XP, Win 7 or (naturally...) Win 8..10.

Comment 8

[[e-mail]]

I've made some screenshots and will try to upload them.

---

Thunderbird with CustomizeMyBird and the coloured emoticons as I see them.
I've selected a few mails with emoticons. I don't want to show my complete inbox now,
but believe me, these mails with the yellow-red blobs really do stick out
and draw my focus onto these really unimportant message.

Otherwise, I would be rather happy with the Thunderbird appearance shown there.

---

Thunderbird with the Microbird theme.
This adds more colour all around, and thereby ameliorates the impact of the yellow smileys.
Remarkably, it also brings a menu separator style consistent with the remainder of the program/environment.

---

Pulldown-Menu examples from three different configurations:

On my system with "Classic" Win 7 , with Microbird theme.

On my system with the Thunderbird Default theme.

On another system, I guess w/o any plugins, with "Win 7" Win 7.

Please note that the height of the highlight rectangle around the menu bar entry is too large
in the last screenshot, and it's also using a completely wrong colour.

It was *very similar* to that on my system before some of the plugins that may have corrected that;
at the moment I can't reproduce that here (and I'm happy and don't want to change that :-)  ).



N.B.: If I would use the "Theme Font & Size Changer" Little Theme, that would leave the window title bar colour
 always in some grey/metallic blend; i.e. non-functional to indicate the active window. Many themes do that,
 they're all non-usable from my point of view because they slow down my orientation while using the system.


So I think there are a multitude of issues that are simply caused by overriding the intended
system wide appearance and intended functionality of a variety of window elements, in favour
of some home-brew (or GTK, or Winamp skin, or whatever origin) alternative set of ideas.

If you could simply go back to using the system standard (on whatever system you're on),
and leaving menus in menu bars, and dialogs in dialog windows (NOT would-be-HTML-pages hiding just
the things the user NEEDS to see, like in your new add-ons manager or in MS Word's new print "dialog"),
you might produce a way more usable application. With much less of an effort :-)

Please forgive me for mixing all these issues into one post.
My general message is: could you please keep it more unchanged, and less distractive.


Thank you again for your very fast response to this bug report.

Comment 9

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: TB 52.0 Distracting Coloured Emoticons Default Theme (and CustomizeMyBird for Tabs)

This shows the coloured Emoticons that are apparently a result of the newly added support for coloured Unicode items.

The problem is that they make the least important messages the most distracting elements in the inbox - especially as the remainder of the Thunderbird window has become rather uniformly gray over time.

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: 2017_04_09_21_49_22_Thunderbird-Coloured-Emoticons-Distraction-Ameliorated-by-Colours-from-Microbird-Plugin-on-Win7-Classic.png

This shows the coloured Emoticons that are apparently a result of the newly added support for coloured Unicode items.

Here, the Microbird theme adds so much "8-bit-style" colour throughout the window, that the coloured Unicode items in the inbox are less distracting... :-)

But that's not my preferred solution to the problem.
It would be better, if colour could simply be switched off for Unicode character display in subject lines within a mailbox directory.

Comment 11

[[e-mail]]

I don't add the menu screenshots here, because they're a different story
and at least the separator lines are apparently being in the process of being solved,
according to:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1354217

Thanks again for your efforts and kind regards! Joerg

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

Just for the record:

When I open a message that has such a Unicode Emoticon in its subject line,
this subject line appears in the window title.

There, the Unicode Emoticon is represented by an empty square box only :-)
(Meaning unknown character / cannot be displayed in a correct way).

I like that. :-)

And I'd be very happy if I could activate the exact same behaviour for the inbox,
Maybe it would be sufficiently discouraging to all the marketing people who currently abuse these things...

Kindest regards, again! Joerg

P.S.: Sorry for the many typos in my posts above [...]

Comment 13

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to Richard Marti (:Paenglab) from comment #4)
> [...]
> 
> (In reply to Jorg K (GMT+2) from comment #3)
> > I've noticed them, Richard, since when do we do these? Does this have
> > anything to do with bug 638335?
> 
> This was for XP and Linux. Win 7 already supported coloured fonts. I think
> there must be a toolkit change which fully enabled it.



More workarounds, and probably the answer to "what fully enabled it?":


When I use "Font Theme & Size Changer" plugin to select a different UI font
(starting with Khmer UI), then I find:

Almost ALL choices - even OCR A etc. - keep the coloured smiley,
and a b/w alarm clock in another ebay message subject line.

So I guess they come from another source (probably overriding my UI font selection
whenever that one would NOT have a representation for the required Unicode position itself.)



Notable exceptions are:

"DejaVu Sans" produces black & white smileys back. Puh, I'm saved :-)

"Segoe UI Symbol" produces black & white smileys back, too, with a different design.

"EmojiOne Mozilla" ... not only maintains the yellow/red Smiley blobs,
but even adds colour to the alarm clock from the other message, too.
And moreover, turns all other numbers into pool billard balls.
Is this the future of our desktop computing experience?


So I *guess* that simply removing this font should remove the colour...
...but I don't find it in my system fonts folder. Where is it!?!?

Google finds me:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1292886
Bug 1292886
Color font "EmojiOne Mozilla" prevents Emoji from being monochrome
RESOLVED WONTFIX

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231701
Ship an emoji font on Windows XP-7
RESOLVED FIXED in Firefox 50


There we are.

That's most probably the change that caused my posting.
And removing that font, should remove the color emoticons and bring back my peace :-)

But where is it?

NOT in the System Control / Fonts dialog...
But here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\fonts\EmojiOneMozilla.ttf

Well, another deviation from established standards.

But fair enough, I think renaming that file should remove
the coloured-emoticons-make-the-inbox-annoying,too advertising platform.


Thanks again for your help (and for considering making this portion of Thunderbird an optional install).

Kindest regards again, Joerg

Comment 14

[[e-mail]]

Renaming the file extension WON'T suffice, renaming the Folder (fonts -> fonts-renamed-away) WILL.

js

Comment 15

[[e-mail]]

Btw., technically, interpreting a file with a random filename extension as a font file,
*might* be a security risk:

If you're attempting to interpret a file that does NOT have a .TTF extension as a Font file,
you *might* risk interpreting anything as a font file - even if that was never ever intended
by the preparer of a system to be interpreted like that.

I don't know if font files can already contain the equivalent of a macrovirus (or any executable code,
or references to that) - but given the foreseeable need for glyphs that are not only coloured,
but also animated, interactive, and have an on-line auto-downloadable overloadable live-updatable
object portion - that might very well be the case in the near future.

OR simply, your font file handler library might integrate some handlers of other files with
exactly these properties.

So even if it's convenient, and even if magic numbers are much more powerfull than filename extensions
(and should still be tested of course) - you should probably not try to interpret anything as a font file,
that does not have a suitable filename extension in the first place, at least in an environment like
MS Windows that traditionally uses filename extensions as the original designator of file type.

I'm not truly educated in this field, but this warning comes to my mind as a consequence of the
observation reported in the preceding post.

Once again, thank you, and kind regards - js

Comment 16

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: Unicode Icons back in b/w - still intrusive advertising, but a bit less distracting than fully saturated yellow/red blobs

This screenshot shows Thunderbird with Default Layout (plus CustomizeMyBird for Tabs), after renaming the subfolder "fonts" away.

When the file "EmojiOne Mozilla.ttf" cannot be found, the annoying Unicode icons are at least returned to black & white only.

N.B.: That is still intrusive advertising. Even in b/w, they already draw attention due to their distinctive forms, and I remember it really annoyed me when they first appeared.

In colour, its even worse: Each of these messages is truly highlighted by two rather large, yellow/red blobs, one on either side.

As a consequence, I consider removing the two other fonts containing Unicode glyphs from my system, too - or selectively removing abused glyphs from these font files - or to filter out Unicode references to smileys etc. from e-Mail subject lines. [...]

Comment 17

[[e-mail]]

Not by me - noticed it when cleaning up, further down in my Google search for "emojione mozilla font":

https://superuser.com/questions/1111369/how-to-disable-colored-emoji-font-in-firefox-50

Apparently, I'm not alone :-)

Comment 18

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to [e-mail] from comment #17)
> Apparently, I'm not alone :-)
But you're pretty much alone in this bug, so to say a "solo entertainer" (Alleinunterhalter). I haven't un-CC'ed from many bugs during my "membership" here, but this one is becoming too noisy for no net effect.