1874419 - The quick filter should indicate in the thread pane that a search is still in progress.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[Mathias Körber]

Attachment: TBsearch.mp4

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I entered a search term in 'Quick filter'(subject only) which resulted in few results.
I then clicked the 'Body' scope selection to find more results.

Actual results:

TB displayed all of the current folder as 'results' in the message index pane while processing the new search, (which is confusing [ a lie])
and only when that was finished displayed the actual results.
In fact, apart from a very small indication on the bottom, there is no indication that the search is stil ongoing and what is shown are not the result (neither the ones from before, nor the final ones, but instead it shows everything in the folder being searched!)

Expected results:

While re-searching my search-term with scope set to 'body',

See the attached MP4 (blurred for privacy). The initial 'subject or sender' search found only a single result. After switching to include 'Body', (which takes 8 seconds, [ from ca 0:00:05 to second 0:00:13 in the video] , the result window shows many more entries which are in fact not search results, ultil the search completes.

It would be useful for TB to

• not pretend it had found many more results while still searching
  AND either
  a) keep the old search result until the the message index pane. (not ideal)
  b) somehow mark in the message index pane that what is shown is not final and that the search is still going on

I often have folders which are much larger and where a full body search can take many more seconds, even minutes . There being no indication that the search is still ongoing, and the message index pane showing many non-results during that time, it s hard to tell when it is ready or whether the result is in fact complete.

for option b) above, it might be useful to either

• colour the background if the message index pane while a search in progress
• blur that window
• or otherwise overlay a banner that indicates the search is not completed. (a progress meter sounds nice but would likely be lying as to expected completion). Maybe the banner should indicate time taken so far during the search?)

This is TB 116.6 on OSX

Comment 2

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Needinfo Vineet on this so he can investigate the performance implications of reimplementing setTabThinking().
We might fallback to a different solution as we disabled that due to CPU spikes and unnecessary DOM layout reflows.
https://searchfox.org/comm-central/search?q=setTabThinking&path=&case=false&regexp=false

Comment 3

[jdien07]

A further aspect of this bug is that sometimes I will get the in progress list and one of them is the one I am looking for, so all good. But when I click on it, the message changes to another message that is also part of the search set but hasn't been displayed yet, so it makes this in progress display especially useless.

Comment 4

[jdien07]

(In reply to jdien07 from comment #3)

A further aspect of this bug is that sometimes I will get the in progress list and one of them is the one I am looking for, so all good. But when I click on it, the message changes to another message that is also part of the search set but hasn't been displayed yet, so it makes this in progress display especially useless.

and since it's not giving me any indication of when the search is complete, I can't just wait till it is done.
TB 115.11.0 on Pop!_OS 22.04

Comment 5

[Vineet Deo]

I have not noticed any discernible difference in CPU spike when using the QFB for search with setTabThinking() re-instated. However, the setTabThinking() function does not behave consistently. It might be more appropriate to re-factor/re-implement this function with specific requirements for it's behaviour.

Comment 6

[Vineet Deo]

I'm going to tackle this bug by adding a small spinner where it shows the number of results found before they are found - eg while the search is happening. That way, we know the search is complete when the spinner is no longer there.

Comment 7

[Vineet Deo]

Attachment: Bug 1874419 - Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Comment 8

[[e-mail]]

As noted in bug 1831500, setTabThinking() is meant to be called to show "Searching..." in the status bar.
https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/b675b13ad0a6a34a682dcf29e54532e29b43db8b/mail/base/content/tabmail.js#1786
That's how it worked in 102. If you don't intend to restore that, you can remove the obsolete function.

Comment 9

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

We're still in the 129 cycle until July 8th

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/4300976cf55b
Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Comment 12

[Vineet Deo]

Comment on attachment 9411172 [details]
Bug 1874419 - Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

[Approval Request Comment]
Regression caused by (bug #): -
User impact if declined: There would be no searching indication in the quick filter bar.
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): Tested on cc, added test to ensure visibility of throbber.
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): None.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9411172 [details]
Bug 1874419 - Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

[Triage Comment]
Approved for beta

Comment 14

[Corey Bryant]

This is now in beta. Vineet, do we want to uplift this to 128?

Comment 15

[Vineet Deo]

Comment on attachment 9411172 [details]
Bug 1874419 - Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

[Approval Request Comment]
Regression caused by (bug #): -
User impact if declined:There would be no searching indication in the quick filter bar.
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): Tested on cc and beta, added test to ensure visibility of throbber.
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): None

Comment 16

[Vineet Deo]

Comment on attachment 9411172 [details]
Bug 1874419 - Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

[Approval Request Comment]
Regression caused by (bug #): -
User impact if declined: There would be no searching indication in the quick filter bar.
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): Tested on cc, beta, added test to ensure visibility of throbber.
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): None.

Comment 17

[Corey Bryant]

Comment on attachment 9411172 [details]
Bug 1874419 - Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

[Triage Comment]
Approved for esr128

Comment 18

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 128.1.0esr:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr128/rev/ade5082d4e97

Comment 19

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Causing a test failure and possibly a crash on c-esr128:
PROCESS-CRASH | Missing chrome or resource URLs: chrome://messenger/skin/icons/spinning.svg [@ mozilla::net::CheckForBrokenChromeURL] | comm/mail/test/browser/quick-filter-bar/browser_filterLogic.js
TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | comm/mail/test/static/browser_parsable_css.js | missing chrome://messenger/skin/icons/spinning.svg referenced from chrome://messenger/skin/shared/quickFilterBar.css -

spinning.svg was added in Bug 1905839 (tb129) and is not uplifted to c-esr128.

Comment 20

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Backout esr128:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr128/rev/c5fd52b41670

Comment 21

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

If this is wanted on esr128, something needs to be done about comment 19.

Comment 22

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

I replied with what we should do about it in Bug 1905839, copying it here for easy tracking:

we should create a 128 dedicated patch that uses the m-c spinner

Comment 23

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Comment on attachment 9411172 [details]
Bug 1874419 - Add spinning svg to quick filter bar to show while search is progress. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Removing approval flag for now. Please re-request when the spinner patch for esr128 is ready.

Comment 24

[Vineet Deo]

Will create a bug for adding the m-c spinner and re-request when that is ready for esr128.