1677656 - Option to switch off visual mouse hover effect on rows in message and folder lists: too noisy, flickering, not healthy (esp. animation-sensitive users)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Leo]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 11_0_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.193 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I just updated to 78.4.3, Mac.

Now the mouse keeps highlighting messages and folders as it hovers over them.

It's obviously quite annoying and misleading and feels like the mouse button is stuck (while it's not).

If it's a bug then I hope it can be fixes as soon as possible. Because it ruins the otherwise amazing Thunderbird experience!

If for some reason it's some kind of optional effect, then how can I disable it? I couldn't find any setting for this.

Thanks,
Leo

Actual results:

Rows gets highlighted for no reason as mouse hovers over them

Expected results:

Rows should NOT get highlighted just because the mouse is passing over them

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Leo, could you add a screenshot with one selected message and one hovered message side by side? Is it a lack of contrast/distinction between selected and hovered message rows? Remove private data.

Generally speaking, hover effect is by design to offer visual feedback which row you are hovering. That's common practice virtually everywhere in software, so this looks like invalid or wontfix.

Comment 2

[Leo]

Thomas,

Thanks for the prompt reply.

The problem is the fact of highlighting itself.

I'm sorry, but this is NOT a common practice in software. That is, not in the UI ares we're discussing: lists of rows such as tables and outline views.

Few examples:

-macOS Finder
-Xcode
-Excel
-And of course Thunderbird itself: ever since its inception up until now.

Users don't need constant highlighting of elements mouse just happens to be over. In overwhelming majority of cases it only creates unnecessary distractions and sensory overload with unnecessary visual feedback. When I DO need to select a message I'm already following the mouse, thank you.

Just one example: I move the mouse from the message list in Thunderbird to the Dock on Mac. In the process, the mouse highlights a message and then a folder in the folder pane. NONE of which I need: I'm just moving a mouse somewhere. Yet now I'm distracted TWICE by elements that are totally irrelevent to the operation. And it can happen HUNDREDS times a day. It's not good user experience - and it's UNHEALTHY experience.

Once again: Thunderbird NEVER behaved like this.

It's quite possible that some users find it beneficial for whatever reason. But other users must have an option to disable it.

So I have faith that Thunderbird team will let us disable this effect - which was never part of Thunderbird in the first place.

Sincerely,
Leo

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

probably related to bug 1677272. There is not yet a fix or workaround, other than to use the beta version.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #3)

probably related to bug 1677272. There is not yet a fix or workaround, other than to use the beta version.

No, it's not that. This bug argues that any hover effect on messages and folders is creating too much visual noise and is "unhealthy" (always flickering) rather than "helpful" (selection guidance).

(In reply to Leo from comment #2)

I'm sorry, but this is NOT a common practice in software. That is, not in the UI ares we're discussing: lists of rows such as tables and outline views.

• I'm not going to discuss that further, maybe it's different on Mac. In the world of Windows, hover effects are all over the place. As for "tabular lists of things", the most common example is Windows Explorer (default file manager).
• The purpose of hover effects is to guide the user with visual feedback to click/select the right thing and not some neighboring item. Also to ensure that data from the same row in different columns which might be wide-spread can be safely associated (say subject and date column).

Users don't need constant highlighting of elements mouse just happens to be over. ... it only creates unnecessary distractions and sensory overload with unnecessary visual feedback.

Richard, "sensory overload" is the keyword here.

• Can we observe that anti-animation pref for message list/folder list hover effects? I think users who are sensitive against animations will certainly also suffer from the flickering hover effect.
• Maybe we could use the pref to set an attribute "data-no-animation" on the lists and observe that in CSS to skip the hover effect when the pref is true, or something like that?
• And/or perhaps the hover effect could come with a bit of delay or when mouse remains on one spot so that faster mouse moves across won't trigger on every unrelated item?

Comment 5

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

We enabled the hover state on all platforms to unity the appearance as it was demanded for Linux too. We could use the check of the system pref prefers-reduced-motion and then disable the hover. but then other things like animated popups etc. would be also disabled.

Alex, what do you think about removing the hover state on treeitems? This seems to bugger only the reporter as I never heard any complain about the hover state.

Comment 6

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Yeah, I don't agree with this.
Having an hover effect on long list is common and necessary to increase position awareness and target feedback.

macOS is very particular as it doesn't even follow its own design scheme.
No hover effect on folder lists, but menu lists they have it.
No hover effect on tab buttons, but toolbar buttons have it.
I think that's indicative of the blend between a touch and traditional desktop interface, but that's another story.

Regarding disabling the hover effect based on the reduced motion pref, I'm not sure.
That pref is for visually sensitive users that are affected by animations.
Do we have any feedback or confirmation that the hover effect is bad for these users?
I'd like to avoid the situation where a user reports: "I disabled the animations because they make me dizzy, but now the message list doesn't have a rollover effect".

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Elizabeth,
Will this issue be gone with version 115?

Comment 8

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

Hover effects are important for visual cues. Using backgrounds on hover to show the active hovered item remains in 115. This is for folders and mail items in the mail tab.

If there is future support from the community for it, we could remove the hover effect or have an alternative for the prefers reduced motion setting. Or there could be a setting to turn hover effects off in the message list and folder tree.

I looked through the open bugs and did not come across anyone else requesting this feature.

The following code for 115 could be used to remove the hover effect:

#folderTree, #threadTree {
  --treeitem-background-hover: transparent;
}

Comment 9

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Thanks Elizabeth for the explanation.
To add to that, in 115 the hover effect animation respects the reduced-motion option so if your OS has an option to reduce the motion, TB will follow along.