1482430 - There is no 'account settings' icon for the toolbar

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Toolbars and Tabs, enhancement)

Description

[najoll]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0
Build ID: 20180807170231

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to drag a shortcut for 'account settings' to the toolbar, to stop one having to wade through menus to get to that function.


Actual results:

Upon squinting at the available icons (for, there is no search and no way of changing ordering - there is an existing bug report for this, but Bugzilla search appears not to be working at present) I discover that there is no icon for account settings.


Expected results:

This is an important function. It should have an icon. There is an extension that adds it. That extension broke aspects of my Thunderbird last time I tried and probably is not (at least 'strictly') compatible with TB 60.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Probably not there because for most users it would not get enough usage

Comment 2

[najoll]

@Wayne

Thanks. I am unsure that is a sufficient justification for developers acting in a way that is trivial for them, viz., adding the icon. Is it?

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Since you are asking my opinion, yes, I agree with the (perhaps intentional) decision that there is not a settings icon. Let me ask, how many days a week or days a month do you create or change an account?   And how does that rate of usage square with things you have in your toolbar?

Developers, and others who work with them, attempt to estimate and make rational decisions all the time in what they hope is the best interest of MOST users (not just some).  Sometimes a deciding factor to not do something is based on effort (too little value for a relatively high effort, often relative to other more pressing issues) and sometimes the deciding factor is strictly value (not helpful enough to high enough percentage of users - regardless of the amount of effort, including "trivial effort").

Comment 4

[najoll]

> how many days a week or days a month do you create or change an account? 

I am unsure, but few. *However*: some several days a month I look up my account settings - for the information is germane to troubleshooting problems and for checking which accounts I am using and what their settings are. (Relevant here is the fact that Thunderbird is not bug free.)

    Your view seems to be that if implementing feature F

   (i) is trivial
   (ii) helps some but only some hundreds of users
   and indeed
   (iii) helps those people in a way that the developers find understandable

then nonetheless you will not implement F because hundreds is too small a number. Let's call that view (as seems fair so to do, if I make no mistake) *Numbers Trump Everything*.

    Is Numbers Trump Everything consistent with the view - which I took to be that of Thunderbird's makers - that Thunderbird means to be a highly customisable client that well serves the needs of, among others, tech-savvy users?

    Also, have you expended more effort in this conversation than would be required to add the icon at issue? If so, is that fact relevant?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I am not a developer nor have I pretended to be, so these comments have not caused a loss of coding time. You asked my opinion and I offered it