193239 - click print icon pops up print option window, should just print

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Printing, defect, P4)

Description

[Seth Master]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210

when you click on the print button, it brings up a print option window, with the
options to which printer you want to print to if you have multiple setup, with
the default already hightlighted. Then when you click ok button on this window,
it prints.
Why not just print without the extra print option window, to print to your
default printer, and if the user wanted the print option window, put it as part
of the drop down on the print button.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
try to print from the mail/news client, you will see that it pops up the print
window box.

Actual Results:  
the print window box pops up.

Expected Results:  
not have poped up the print window box and just print to the default printer.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Is it not standard behavior for apps to put up that dialog when the "print"
option is selected?  In other words, wouldn't we be surprising a lot of users by
printing things when they expect to be able to change some settings of the printout?

Comment 2

[Seth Master]

Actually, try printing in IE, you will see that there is no pop-up print 
window, it takes your default printer, and prints whatever page you have up.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Confirming based on that comment (there was a reason I asked what the default
app behavior was -- the last time I printed anything in a Windows app was about
6 years ago.... If I could just try it, I would have done so)

Comment 4

[Seth Master]

It whould be nice if we could get this into the next relase.

I feel that if you click on the icon on the main window of mail/news, or even
the browswer for that matter, that you should just print to the default printer.
Which is how almost all windows apps behave. And if you go to file, print, then
you get the print window.

Comment 5

[Seth Master]

This doesnt effect just mail/news, it also effects the browser as well.
Can we mark this as target milestone for 1.6a? 

Comment 6

[Joe Infla]

See
http://mecha.mozilla.org/webtools/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=129685&action=view#00111
...which mentions a hidden boolean pref print.always_print_silent.  This does,
however, affect the File-->Print behavior as well as the button behavior.

Comment 7

[Seth Master]

the url in comment #6 is a broken link.

Comment 8

[Joe Infla]

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=129685&action=view#00111
Probably copied the other link during the server transition or something, sorry.

Comment 9

[Dan Mellem]

This is common with the Microsoft products, rare for others. I personally don't like programs (e.g., MS Word) that immediately print so I usually swap out the "Print" button for the "Print..." one. It'd be better to add an additional button instead of changing the existing behavior.

Comment 11

[lord_alan]

Direct printing when clicking on the "print" icon is also the standard action in OpenOffice.org on Linux. 

This is not just a Windows bug. On Gnome/Linux the standard action also appears to print directly when clicking the icon and to load the print dialogue when using the "Print ..." menu option.

This "bug" also occurs in Firefox 3.6 too so is not limited to TB.

Comment 12

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Why is this a core issue?  The TB UI could just print directly instead of posing the print dialog, but it chooses to do the latter.  Just because Firefox makes the same choice doesn't make this a core bug; it's two separate UI bugs.