1597748 - After selecting a message in Inbox, focus shifts to the message content, preventing keyboard navigation of messages

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Mark T]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Open the Inbox, click on a message. Use up/down arrow to navigate messages.

Actual results:

Focus shifts away from selected message in inbox, and shifts to the content of the message instead. The up/down arrow scrolls the content and does not switch between messages. Returning to the message list without the mouse requires 8 presses of the Tab key, and after a second, focus returns AGAIN to the message content, so that keyboard navigation is highly unwieldy.

Expected results:

Keep focus in the message list. Alternatively, allow a single tab/shift-tab to switch between the message list and the message content. Never force a shift of focus after manually selecting the message list.

Comment 1

[Mark T]

Email is a keyboarding activity. I'm constantly switching from the keyboard to the mouse to get around this issue. Thunderbird is such a mature product, I'm astounded that a usability issue like this exists today.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Open the Inbox, click on a message. Use up/down arrow to navigate messages.

I cannot reproduce this. Thus, likely something in your config, the content of your messages, or the preview pane [1] that is causing this problem. Also, try Help > Restart with addons disabled.

Returning to the message list without the mouse requires 8 presses of the Tab key

F6 is what you want to navigate between panes

and after a second, focus returns AGAIN to the message content, so that keyboard navigation is highly unwieldy.

This also sounds like [1] or something caused by an addon

[1] I've seen this happen when "find" text is active in the preview pane

Comment 3

[Mark T]

Thanks, I will try the navigation option and remove/reinstall to see if it affects the behavior, also install on another computer to confirm it's this machine (as oposed to my account, or who knows what else). I'll update here after that.

Comment 4

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard

Comment 5

[Mark T]

Confirming that I did have search windows open in the background at the time of the odd behavior. Closing these provided relief from the symptoms. Thanks.