1665191 - Account names not fully visible, needlessly truncated: account settings' account list is too narrow

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot: Regular length account name getting truncated in the list, but lots of space all around.

See screenshot.

Any accounts with a real-life full email address with company domain as account name, anything longer than [e-mail], gets truncated in the accounts list of account settings, but there's loads of space left, right and centre. This can be quite inconvenient for managing multiple accounts because finding the right one can become a guessing game.

Possible improvements:

• Shrink that whitespace on the left side of accounts list (a fraction would do)
• increase default width of accounts list
• I think a splitter would make sense, we can add min-width to the settings panel on the right; maybe max-width on the list to not be more than 30% of window width.
• There's more whitespace on the right side of settings and most screens are wide these days, so whichever way of giving the account list more width should work.
• Please increase the width of the account name input box!

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Richard, anything we can do to improve this along the improvements proposed in my comment 0? Needlessly truncated account names in account manager's main list aren't nice, even error-prone when you have similar account names.

Comment 2

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #0)

Possible improvements:

• Shrink that whitespace on the left side of accounts list (a fraction would do)
  The content max width was set to 800px to be inline with the prefs.
• increase default width of accounts list
  On Daily this is now dynamic.
• Please increase the width of the account name input box!
  This can be done easily.

Alessandro, what do you think about the content width?

Comment 3

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

We fixed the majority of this problems on daily with the new treelist custom element, like Richard said.

I think a splitter would make sense

We can consider implementing a splitter as I think it will offer a fix for any possible scenario, but we shouldn't implement a XUL splitter since we're working very hard to remove all XUL elements, and the new account manager list was replaced with the new element.
We should wait for this after bug 1729386 lands.

Alessandro, what do you think about the content width?

We shouldn't increase it as the settings are kept in a narrow column for obvious readability reasons.
Letting all that content spread across the full screen will make things pretty hard to read.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Richard Marti (:Paenglab) from comment #2)

Richard, please add empty lines after every quote, especially when the quote has bullets. Your reply got mangled with my quotes.

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #0)

Possible improvements:

• Shrink that whitespace on the left side of accounts list (a fraction would do)

The content max width was set to 800px to be inline with the prefs.

I was talking about shrinking the whitespace margin on the left side of accounts list, which is unnecessarily big (which is a disadvantage on small screens or TB shown half-screen).

• increase default width of accounts list

On Daily this is now dynamic.

Without a sanity check :-/ So if I happen to have one longer account name, the entire UI gets exploded. Hmm....
We should also uplift something to 91 asap, this is quite a nuisance.
A splitter is really needed. Splitter custom element (bug 1729386) is great, but not ready. Imho we shouldn't make our users suffer longer with this - even a XUL splitter will do if that speeds up the fix, I'd think that's something like 3 lines of code, no?

• Please increase the width of the account name input box!

This can be done easily.

Do you want to do it here?

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #4)

A splitter is really needed. Splitter custom element (bug 1729386) is great, but not ready. Imho we shouldn't make our users suffer longer with this - even a XUL splitter will do if that speeds up the fix, I'd think that's something like 3 lines of code, no?

Any such ships sailed a long time ago. A fix couldn't even be beta tested anymore, and overall focus should now be on the next release rather than tiny issues in 91.

Comment 6

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1665191-account-field.patch

Made the server name field flexing and made that all sub pages show the same max width. The encryption, IM and SMTP pages where a bit wider than the others because the padding didn't apply at the same places.

Comment 7

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Comment on attachment 9242495 [details] [diff] [review]
1665191-account-field.patch

Review of attachment 9242495 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Nice fix, with a little nit addressed.
Also, please update the commit message to add "...in the Account manager tab" at the end.

::: mail/themes/shared/mail/accountManage.css
@@ +19,4 @@
>  #containerBox {
>    max-width: 800px;
> +  padding-block: 40px;
> +  padding-inline: 24px 28px;

This also needs width: 100%; as some sections seem to ignore the `flex="1"` attribute, and they look narrower than others.
Not sure why.

Comment 8

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

I agree with Magnus in comment 5, and the fixes done by Richard are very minor but good.
We can focus on something more "drastic" for the next ESR as 91 currently offer better UI and usability in this area compared to 78, so a splitter is not needed for now.

Comment 9

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1665191-account-field.patch

Added the width: 100;. This now also needed to make the server name text field flexing more to fit the width.

Comment 10

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1665191-account-field.patch

Forgot a qrefresh.

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/bfd1d0ce1a92
Make the Account name field wider in the Account manager tab. r=aleca

Comment 12

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1665191-account-field-beta.patch

[Approval Request Comment]
User impact if declined: smaller text fields that don't always show the full content
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): on c-c
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): should be low

Comment 13

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1665191-account-field-ESR.patch

[Approval Request Comment]
User impact if declined: smaller text fields that don't always show the full content
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): on c-c
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): should be low. The SelectedItem wasn't used now.

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9242837 [details] [diff] [review]
1665191-account-field-beta.patch

[Triage Comment]
Approved for beta

Comment 15

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 93.0b5:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/1620adf0483b

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9242838 [details] [diff] [review]
1665191-account-field-ESR.patch

[Triage Comment]
Approved for esr91

Comment 17

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 91.2.0:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr91/rev/1ef0f08a9b7a

Comment 18

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Verified in my test of the 91.2 release candidate on Windows 10.