1655250 - Split "Options > General" into more specific subsections

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Anje]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Menu app icon > Options

Actual results:

Menu list contains:
'General'
'Composition'
'Privacy & Security'
'Chat'
'Calendar'

Expected results:

This is a very short list and there is more than ample space to add more items.

The 'General' option is currently a lump it all into one place everything that is not composing or privacy. This includes everything that is totally unrelated and currently not organised.

It looks like someone borrowed code from Firefox and lumped it together because well who knows, I cannot think of any reason why anyone would do it.

It means it is now difficult to offer easy instructions on how to locate just about anything. It is disorganised.

How can you lump default search engine with incoming mail, attachments, tags, Network and disc space, Languages, scrolling, alerts, Thunderbird updates, fonts - ( but only in Display section ), Offline instructions, and accessing the Config Editor, plus a load more I've missed out. There are no tabs, just a continuous scroll need to scan everything as you go., until you eventually find something.

This is - well I'm just flabberghasted.

If individual tabs within eg: 'General' are not something you want to use as the new design moves away from this....Then please use the menu area on the left side to list all these different sections, so people will not get confused. I use 'Config Editor' a fair amount - I have to scroll for ever to locate this at the bottom under 'General' - it is illogical.
You should not need to dig around or scroll endlessly. Libaries have various sections for different genre. Documents have a table of contents. Thunderbird needs a similar structure to reduce the endless lumping of disconnected items in one 'General' miscellaneous section.

The left side menu ideally should have:

1. 'General' - for general items - TB start page, default search engine, alerts, system integration & updates, language and date/time formatting - scolling.
2. 'Reading & Display' - for display related items like marking messages as read, opening in tab etc, display name, font, colours, plain text, return receipts (which may also work under 'Composition')
3. 'Files & Attachments' - where to save files, attachment options and tags,
4. 'Composition'
5. 'Privacy & Security'
6. 'Network & Disc Space' - for connection, offline, disk space & indexing
7. 'Config Editor' - deserves to be a standalone option as it is refered to alot.
8. 'Chat'
9. 'Calendar'

This is a plea for common sense to prevail with urgency.

Comment 1

[Icanilla]

+1.
The Config Editor especially could use help.

Comment 2

[mrartist]

I find it all a mess, stuff everywhere and complicated to change simple things with no clear differentiation between functions in Config Editor and the Options sections which both seem to require excruciating pain for things like changing visual aspects requiring activating say userChrome.css and then guessing css code to improve things just to get things in TB useable and working in a functional and practical way that users desire, need and find best to work with (or just how they used to be before an update!).

Before we regrettably lost (due to author fatigue it seems) so many of the great long-developed add-ons that often helped us so much to create the TB we wanted and what made TB so great, the above issues weren't such a problem but as these missing functions from ex-add-ons don't now seem to be available by other means, we are left to our own devices and/or suffer the random visual changes that seem to be inflicted on us during updates without warning or mention and thus with no means to get things back to how we liked them before. Surely some of these visual functional changes could be built into the Options, like wysiwyg changing of fonts, spacing, colours and hover effects, not to mention all of the other areas that could do with simplifying and tidying up.

By seemingly randomly changing the way things work visually in TB, and at the same time not offering easy or obvious ways for users to customise things to their needs or liking, it will be putting a lot of people off using TB. If it hadn't been with the help of others who were also suffering on the forums to get our TB's back to a functional (visual and useable) state after recent undocumented update changes, I would have given up with TB after many years of dedicated use - I was that close and that's me as an experienced long-term user. Imagine what happens to all those that don't dare delve into the dragon's lair of Config Editor and attempt to play with settings using instructions or manuals that don't actually exist, playing with fire and mystical 'legacy' or otherwise cryptic settings that no one really seems to know what's does what? Only by following hours and hours worth of weird trails of forum hunting and experimenting do we each, on our own, perhaps find the mystical answers to our riddled troubles.

I'm sure there were good security reasons why TB had to kill off all those gold-standard and wonderful add-ons where authors just couldn't do what they used to do and mentally gave up, but I'm still not actually sure if any of it did us any good in the long run - I have lost so much since and I still grieve for TB's good old days which was only about a year ago when it all started to go wrong.

Come on TB, time to get back to being the best again, show Outlook and Gmail etc how it should be done. At the moment, TB just scares new users (and old ones) and it's interface for fully configurable options needs a good rethink, and perhaps bringing a lot of useful stuff in to it from that dangerous firy place known as the Config Editor which as it turns out is not that scary if only its cryptic settings were usefully documented somewhere that mere mortals can find and make sense of.