1752702 - message pane sometimes displays on startup, despite shutdown state where the pane is set to not display

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[David McDivitt]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.99 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I open Thunderbird as usual.

Actual results:

My folders appear in the left pane and messages within the selected folder appear in the right pane, but sometimes the reading pane appears below the message list on the right side. I press F8 to hide the reading pane. The reading pane appears in this manner five percent of the time and must be hidden each time. Thunderbird is not honoring saved preferences in those times. This problem has been present a long, long time over many versions.

Expected results:

The reading pane should never appear when Thunderbird opens if preferences do not lend to that.

Comment 1

[David McDivitt]

After reading my report, for clarity I should add the problem only occurs when Thunderbird opens. Pressing F8 hides the reading pane. The reading pane has never appeared in this manner except when Thunderbird opens.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I cannot reproduce this using a current beta on Mac.
But there are two other bug reports on this issue

• Bug 1658151 - Message Pane settings do not persist after restart
• (the grand daddy) Bug 617356 - I keep trying to turn off the mesage pane, and it keeps coming back randomly

Comment 3

[David McDivitt]

I don't think other bugs properly describe this one. Setting the message pane to show plainly works when the app is opened and closed several times. Setting it to not show does the same. It's just that occasionally it appears when the app is opened. I do not think "randomly" describes the problem. It does not happen randomly, just rarely or occasionally, and it never happens right away or within the next few times the app opens.

It may be happening following application update, since it did happen today after I downloaded and updated. Maybe it is happening those times when Thunderbird updates itself automatically and the update negates the message pane setting.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

There should be an update in two weeks.

Comment 5

[David McDivitt]

I opened Thunderbird for the first time today and it had the reading pane present. No updates or anything done. I have never seen it happen so quickly again.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you see this also with beta?

Comment 7

[David McDivitt]

Do you see this also with beta?

The message pane appearing used to be a frequent problem but frequency diminished. When I installed 102 beta yesterday and opened Thunderbird for the first time, the message pane appeared. F8 closed it as usual. Maybe message pane visibility does not always persist with automatic application updates that happen unawares.

Comment 8

[David McDivitt]

The message pane was present yesterday when I opened Thunderbird. The only thing I did previous to that was close Thunderbird the day before, with no message pane. I have version 102 beta. It is the same issue seen over the last several versions.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

What is your situation with the current beta 115?

Comment 10

[David McDivitt]

When I updated to 115.0b1 (64-bit) the message pane appeared when I first opened TB after that update. That was many days back. It is not a reliable problem. If it is going to happen, it seems to when TB is opened for the first time following an update, but only sometimes. Updating does not always produce the issue.

The issue has improved. Two years ago it was a frequent occurrence. It didn't follow an update, but might happen whenever I opened TB.

Since it still happens, but much less frequently, the bug is still there. I am not inconvenienced because it happens so rarely now. If it starts happening more frequently again I will add another comment.