1891540 - Can no longer order folders by hidden columns

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1830262

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Phil Stracchino]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:124.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/124.0

Steps to reproduce:

This is, I am aware, largely a cosmetic issue, but it is also somewhat a functional issue because it creates unnecessary clutter and wastes screen space. I don't actually know what version the behavioral change first appeared in. It's been irritating me for a while but I just now got time and motive to dig into it and find out what is going on.

The short version: For decades, it used to be possible to sort Thunderbird folders by a hidden column. (In my case, my preferred sort order is Order Received.) Some time ago, this option became unavailable. I only TODAY finally stumbled across a post explaining that current Thunderbird releases can only sort on visible/displayed columns, and if you wish to order by a particular column, then you have to display it first.

This is SILLY. The information is clearly present and available whether displayed or not. There is no earthly technical reason why Thunderbird should be limited to sorting a folder only by displayed columns — and even if there were, then Thunderbird should offer some kind of EXPLANATION when you attempt to order by a hidden column that you have to display the column first in order to sort on it.

This is in my opinion a UI/UX BUG that should be fixed. I don't know when or by whom the decision was made to make this behavioral change, but it is a deeply flawed UX change that should never have been made. It is doubly annoying because it is fiddly and frustrating trying to rearrange and resize columns to minimize the space wasted by columns that you aren't interested in actually seeing, but which the interface FORCES you to display ANYWAY if you want to be able to sort on them. (Order Received being an excellent example here.)

Please revert this broken behavioral change.