1792403 - With lower screen resolutions, height of message header of 3-pane's message pane can auto-expand beyond reasonable proportion, so that body pane height becomes tiny. No splitter for manual adjustment.

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

Attachment: header-needs-scrollbar.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:106.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/106.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Use thunderbird on a not-giant screen with "Header > Normal" (so no unreasonably spammy headers!) and browse a larger bunch of e-mails

Actual results:

Unusable due to header area still being REALLY giant and eating up all the screen estate badly needed for e.g. the contents, see screenshot. This bug combined with bug 1781017 combined with bug 1778811 make Thunderbird nearly unusable unless you have a large screen, which is just frustrating. Frequent tests with smaller screen sizes might really help

Expected results:

Header area has reasonable max size with scrollbar

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

What is your screen size, screen resolution, and font size (or DPI)?

Please use bug nnnn when referencing bug reports, so the system links there information. THanks.

Comment 2

[Ellie]

It's a 1920x1080 screen that I run at 1368x768 resolution with default font size but GNOME 3's DPI/display scale set to 125% (the one in the main gnome-control-center display settings that scales up all windows and UI elements as a whole, NOT the one hidden in gnome-tweaks that just scales up the fonts and for only some toolkits).

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I would agree with reporter that what's seen in attachment 9296181 [details] shouldn't happen.
The message header is allowed to take almost 70% of the vertical space shared by message header and message body (vertical Layout).
Maybe the following could help? (I know it's a can of worms, but still...)

• Default height which is calculated and won't allow the message header to take up more vertical space than the body.
• What happened to the user-dragable splitter between msg header and body? Was it removed in bug 1720348?
• If we allow reducing message header height via splitter, we'll also need a min-height for the message header.

I've commented on this in detail in bug 1720348, and Alex seemed to agree to most of that, but not sure what exactly was ultimately implemented.

Comment 4

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Isn't this about the message pane?
All the questions in comment 3 seem to be related to the compose window, which doesn't seem to be what the user originally reported.

As a temporary workaround, you can double click to open the message in a new tab to have more vertical and horizontal space.
That section is very old and the layout is not very flexible, but we're rebuilding it for 115 to gain a much larger scrolling area.
This is a wontfix for 102, unfortunately.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] (PTO Nov 1 - 15) from comment #4)

Isn't this about the message pane?
All the questions in comment 3 seem to be related to the compose window, which doesn't seem to be what the user originally reported.

As a temporary workaround, you can double click to open the message in a new tab to have more vertical and horizontal space.
That section is very old and the layout is not very flexible, but we're rebuilding it for 115 to gain a much larger scrolling area.
This is a wontfix for 102, unfortunately.

Ellie,

Please update the bug report for version 115

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Please leave version set to the earliest known occurrence.

Please update the bug report for version 115

What I mean is, does the problem still occur?

Comment 7

[Ellie]

Attachment: Missing needed scrollbar for headers in Thunderbird 115

My bad for changing the wrong field. Yes, it still happens in 115, see screenshot.

Comment 8

[Ellie]

Attachment: Screenshot with note explaining that if this bug was fixed, landscape on a linux phone would be usable

This bug appears to be the last major blockers to using Thunderbird downwright on an actual Linux phone in landscape mode, for which I have attached a screenshot to show it. Many of the settings screens, including Account Setup, already have scrollbars and therefore are quite usable on mobile. But the message area not being scrollable means that in landscape, it's just not possible to realistically read 99% of the actual e-mail bodies since the header takes up too much space. See the screenshot!

The last major blocker for portrait mode appears to be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1870151 for use on Linux phones.

Since geary seems to have some issues on its own that in my personal opinion just make it rather difficult to use for any non-trivial account setups, and due to gnome-online-accounts's design from how it seems to me like also possibly unsafe, getting Thunderbird onto Linux phones would be a big deal.

Comment 9

[Ellie]

(Screenshot was taken on actual phone)

Comment 11

[MarjaE]

The headers are often long enough to completely block messages in the standard 3-pane view, and use more than half the screen in a separate tab. 1280x720, increased font sizes, compact spacing.

Comment 12

[MarjaE]

Was this regressed by bug 480623, "move compact message header view to an extension"?