1364640 - Change Thunderbird default layout from “Classic View” to “Vertical View”

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Óvári]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170508114559

Steps to reproduce:

Suggestion:

1. Change Thunderbird default layout from “Classic View” to “Vertical View”.


Reasons:

a) Power users would know how to change the layout to classic view

b) It seems that the general view of other email clients is vertical view (as at 16 March 2017)
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/7-best-email-clients-for-windows/ 

c) With wide screens in 16:9 ratios, vertical view displays email better

d) Please advise if you require more reasons

Thank you

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you use calendar?
(This does take away horizontal space)

And, is bug 213945 a prerequisite?

Comment 2

[Óvári]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #1)
> Do you use calendar?
> (This does take away horizontal space)
> 
> And, is bug 213945 a prerequisite?

Yes, Lightning is installed. Clicking on the bottom right opens and shuts the panel.

Bug 213945 is *not* a prerequisite.
TL;DR
Monterail Thunderbird theme for new users mock up:
https://twitter.com/monterail/status/799255859066970112/photo/1

Power users would know how to change the layout to classic if required.

Comment 3

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

(In reply to Óvári from comment #2)
> 
> Bug 213945 is *not* a prerequisite.
> TL;DR
> Monterail Thunderbird theme for new users mock up:
> https://twitter.com/monterail/status/799255859066970112/photo/1

Almost every subject is not completely readable, which is bad for a quick overview. Because of this bug 213945 is a prerequisite.

Do we have some statistics about screen resolutions? Which would maybe also be not very useful as I thing users with big monitors don't use TB in fullscreen.

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

(In reply to Óvári from comment #2)
> Power users would know how to change the layout to classic if required.

Yes, but they'd also know how to switch from classic to vertical, right? Changing the default in this way would be a surprise for non-power users who may not know how to get the old view back.

Also, "everybody is doing it" is not a good motivation for making such a change. Keep in mind that a user may have chosen Thunderbird /because/ of features different from others...

> c) With wide screens in 16:9 ratios, vertical view displays email better

Users do not necessarily have the mail window maximized all the time (I don't), so how do you know that the 16:9 format is always the optimum? The selection could be based on the actual window geometry, which makes things more complicated (e.g., should it switch from classic to vertical view when the user maximizes the window on a 16:9 monitor?).

I'd further agree with Paenglab that extending the message tree with multi-line elements as proposed in bug 213945 is a hard dependency before considering vertical view as the default.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Mockup: Monterail Thunderbird theme (vertical layout)

Attaching the mockup for future reference.