1847487 - mailnews.remember_selected_message not respected - false does not forget selection

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Rob LA LAU]

Steps to reproduce:

Opened a folder.
Selected a message.
Opened another folder.
Came back to the first folder.

Actual results:

The previously selected message was still selected.

Expected results:

Since I have mailnews.remember_selected_message set to FALSE, the message should no longer be selected.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Question - is there a workflow purpose to your needing to forget the last selected message?

Comment 3

[Rob LA LAU]

No, it's a personal preference.

Comment 4

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

This is a fairly bad workflow and we are not supporting it on purpose.

Deselecting a message when switching folders creates some unnecessary and potentially unexpected edge cases, that's why that pref was never exposed to the UI but always kept hidden.

We're going to remove that pref.

Comment 7

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #4)

This is a fairly bad workflow and we are not supporting it on purpose.

Does this mean that there's no longer any interest in upstreaming the folder summary (bug 492158)? This pref (or at least the behavior) is extremely helpful for supporting that UX, since the way the folder summary behaves is that when you select a different folder, it shows the summary first (instead of the last-selected message).

More generally, at the suggestion of :wsmwk, I've tried to offer what assistance I can in helping to upstream the folder summary code, but it's been years of me trying to get reviews for necessary preliminary patches, and as evidenced by this bug, the situation gets progressively worse with each major Thunderbird release.

If there's truly no interest in supporting the folder summary, please just let me know, and I'll mercy-kill the extension and move on with my life.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Sorry to say I don't have anything to add to the technical aspects. But I think something like mail summaries would be well received by users, so a path to helping make that happen would be great.

Comment 9

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

We will explore the possibility of implementing that type of summary.
Using the remember_selected_message pref for some of those stats doesn't look like a good approach and we will explore something better when needed.
We don't have a timeline for that yet.

Comment 10

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #9)

We will explore the possibility of implementing that type of summary.
Using the remember_selected_message pref for some of those stats doesn't look like a good approach and we will explore something better when needed.
We don't have a timeline for that yet.

Is there anything I can do to help on that? I can provide further details about the current implementation (or at least, how it hooks into the rest of Thunderbird) over in bug 492158 if that would be useful. In fact, one way forward might be to provide just the necessary hooks in Thunderbird proper to display a summary page at the right time (once we agree on the behavior), and then we can iterate on designs for the actual summary in an add-on. That's why the current add-on exists in the first place, really.

I'm able to help out with patches here if we can agree on a direction forward (and assuming no one else has time to work on said patches), but I'd need to get some buy-in on the design before spending much time on this.