1586588 - Subscribing to RSS feeds on unstable internet connection should be more resilient

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, enhancement)

Description

[u601362]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Travel on train and use mobile data on my laptop which leads to a very unstable internet connection.

Right click open the context menu "Subscribe" on the news feeds account item in the main window.
Subscribe dialog pops open.

Entered a valid RSS feed URL and clicked the add button.

Actual results:

Label above the button said that there was some error (do not remember which message exactly). That was very likely because there was no internet at all at this point because the train was inside a tunnel and browsing in Firefox also did not work.

Expected results:

When certain errors occur (e.g. DNS lookup failed, connection breaks down, etc.), Thunderbird should automatically retry after n seconds fox x times.

The status label above the add button should indicated some message during this retry period like "Will try x more times, next try in n seconds" while the message is being updated accordingly every second.

It would be nice if the n and x variable would be configurable by the user in the about:config dialog.

Comment 1

[u601362]

Would also be nice that if after a connection finally succeeds after at least one retry, a notification is shown using the operating system's notification mechanism (e.g. the right panel / task bar notifications on Windows 10 or the popup on elementary OS wingpanel)

Reason is because the user might start doing other tasks while Thunderbird tries over and over again. Would be nice to inform him that he can continue with reading the feed he wanted to subscribe to or that the URL was incorrect.

But there should be no notification when subscribing was finished within up to like 3 seconds after clicking the "Add" button as I assume users will be very annoyed when the are notified with a sound / overlay message if there were no problems as they will already see that it worked because the subscribe dialog shows the new feed item then.

That also means that I would like a notification after successfully subscribing to a feed or a connection timeout when it just took quite long because after sometimes I might be annoyed and just quickly check the SMS that just arrived etc.

It should be possible to turn off the notifications for feed subscription results with a property in the about:config dialog.