1831667 - Total message count and Unread count not displayed in status bar. Moved to Message List Header

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect, P2)

Description

[MM]

Attachment: no-counts-in-status-bar.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Total message count and Unread count not displayed in status bar.

In the attached picture: Daily (2023-05-04) above, TB 102 below for comparison.

Comment 1

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

The total message count is now displayed in the message header area.
We also have options to show the unread + total count in the folder pane from the folder pane header context menu (meatball menu).
We're not adding these information back to the status bar.

Comment 2

[MM]

With all due respect, but you're removing established functionality from two decades.
The message list header area can be hidden and the the information in the folder pane can also be hidden or scrolled out of view.
Please re-consider your decision. There is also bug 1821235. The Unread text field also showed the number of selected messages.

Comment 3

[Christian Riechers]

I couldn't agree more with comment #2. Both, the Folder Pane Header, and the Message List Header area do not offer much added value. In the latter case it actually shows a lot of empty space. I'm almost certain I'll hide both of them.
The total count in the folder pane makes the entire pane look pretty crowded, and rather confusing. So I'm not going to use that either. Thus without the counter information in the status bar TB will lack important and long established functionality.
After all TB isn't a piece of art which just needs to look pretty, it should continue to work for it's long time users. Removing established functionality is not helpful in that regard. Therefore please consider restoring the status bar counters. And as implied above, the counter for the no. of selected messages is as important as the total and unread count.

Comment 4

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

The status bar is contextually outside the mail document and it's useless for assistive technologies and discoverability.
We're moving those information to more contextually appropriate areas to better integrate with screen readers and not having the user jumping around with their eyes every time a selection changes.

With that said, we know that these new areas might be controversial, as well as not needed, that's why we allow users to completely hide those new areas as well as their info inside.

So...what about now? Users that don't want headers will never see those info again?
Obviously not!

For that scenario we're implementing a bottom floating tooltip to show those info when a message is selected.
Exactly as it happens when the status bar is hidden and you hover over a link (firefox does the same as they removed the status bar a while ago).

Apologies for the disruption and the temporary lack of data in those areas, but we're working on it and slowly transitioning away from, as you correctly mentioned, decades old implementations that are problematic paradigms we can't carry around.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Further capability mentioned in comment 5 will be provided via bug 1819710.
For now, View > Layout > Message List Header is the location for providing message counts.

Comment 8

[Anje]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #7)

Further capability mentioned in comment 5 will be provided via bug 1819710.
For now, View > Layout > Message List Header is the location for providing message counts.

Currently, 'Message List Header' only displays 'total count' in selected folder it does not display the 'unread count'.
Are there any plans to include the unread message count to that same area?

The 'Status bar' shows a lot of info including whether you are online or offline oris that going to get put somewhere instantly visible as well without needing to search anywhere for it?
It also acts as a footer for the window which I find visually important from a design point of view as I also use the Titlebar at the top. So, maybe if people use a titlebar then they should be allowed to have a footer - status bar as well.