1646874 - Chat preview in preferences tab disabled

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

As a part of bug 1646483, I've commented out the code initialising the chat theme preview in the preferences tab, because it's broken and the unexpected errors cause tests to fail.

It's broken because the conversation-browser element adds a progress listener to itself for initialisation, but this no longer works where conversation-browser is inside another browser. I'm not sure of the need for a progress listener here but nothing else I attempted worked.

Filing a separate bug so that bug 1646483 can be closed.

Comment 1

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Did this bug cause Chat topics and conversations to be blank?

Testing 79.0b1 now and IRC chat (Freenode) is totally useless.

Comment 2

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

No, that's bug 1646611.

Comment 3

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Now that bug 1646611 is fixed -- can this be rolled back or is there something else blocking this?

Comment 5

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Name Thunderbird
Version 84.0a1
Build ID 20201113105419

If the Previews aren't going to be restored can the "Preview:" text and empty space be removed?

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

This hangs together with some larger questions: do we really need to support many themes per se in our chat? Or could we just have the the option for compact and sparse UI? It's a bit odd to have a special theme section for the chat - motivated by different technical implementation .... only.

Comment 7

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

I'm really, really partial to the Bubbles styling, but could use whatever a compact or sparse UI would be if required.

Chat styling preferences do look very empty with the previews missing.

Comment 8

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

I think we do want to keep themes, the different things are really useful depending on whether you predominately use multi-user chats vs. if you use private messages more often. I think removing that option would be a shame.

Comment 9

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Also -- regardless wouldn't you want to be able to preview it, even if you only have two options?

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

You'd select the theme where you normally select the global theme. Like any other parts of the application, chat should blend in. We don't have a preview for any other UI changing prefs.

Slightly related: the variant: Light/dark should also really auto-adjust to the global theme.

Comment 11

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

My 2 cents:
Yes, we should fix the current preview.

However I don't think it makes sense to keep around the chat theme system. We should offer a compact and a "normal" mode, like all modern messaging apps. And the chat theme should adapt to the user's global application theme. This means respecting those theme color variables, but probably also exposing some more and making sure the colors chat chooses work with the theme. I think that's an important part of making chat a coherent part of Thunderbird, and not some island that has its own separate system.

I think we do want to keep themes, the different things are really useful depending on whether you predominately use multi-user chats vs. if you use private messages more often

If our current default theme is bad at one of those two we should fix the one it's bad at. They're different conversation types, and we control the code, so we can give them different styles if we think that's better. Or maybe it doesn't even need separate styles and just some tweaks here and there.

But it would probably be best to first have a telemetry probe informing us what message themes people with chat accounts even have enabled.

Comment 12

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

Attachment: Bug 1646874 - Make chat theme preview work without webProgress. r=mkmelin

Instead the chat browser now listens for the load event.

Comment 13

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/1bdc56892302
Make chat theme preview work without webProgress. r=mkmelin