23326 - UI: Mail/News prefs panels are too large

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 31753

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect, P3)

Description

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

With my prefwindow changes, I've boosted the size of the Pref Window slightly,
but the mail news prefs are still overflowing the available place. Namely:

- Mail & Newsgroups
- Messages

suggest reorganisation of some of these panels' content into separate panels so
that the dialog does not need to be resized. Resizing will not be an option for
640x480 users, where the prefwindow is already as big as it can possibly be
before going off the screen.

Comment 1

[lchiang]

cc: jglick and nbaca

Comment 2

[Phil Peterson]

Reassign to alecf. Can we address this at the same time the Account Setup prefs
get merged back into Preferences? Since Alec's working on that next, marking M13.

Comment 3

[Alec Flett]

moving M13 bugs to M14 to get them off the radar.
(Not to worry, I'm still working on these before my other m13 bugs!)

Comment 4

[Alec Flett]

I'm not seeing mail & news overflowing, but messages definately is. And guess,
what? the overflow seems to be the emoticons stuff. 

Adding rhp in hopes he can add the guy who did the original emoticons stuff.
I've fixed them up a little, but this page is already very very busy. We either
need to find a new home for them, or figure out if there's anything else on the
messages pane that we can toss or move.

I think it's good enough for M14 though, so I'm pushing this out to M15.

Comment 5

[lchiang]

fyi:  bug http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23091 is assigned to 
jglick to use better wording.  Perhaps part of it would be to find a new panel 
for the emoticon prefs.

Comment 6

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

CCing Ben Bucksch, who's the emoticons guy.



I think that all of those `For Incoming Messages' prefs (emoticons etc) should be 

moved from the prefs dialog to a submenu in Messenger's View menu, thusly:



View > Use Text Formatting submenu  [for plain-text messages]

----------------------------------

. _No Wrapping

* _Wrap Long Lines

. _Rewrap All

-----------------------------

/ Highlight _Links

/ Highlight *_Styles*

/ Highlight _Emoticons :-)



[from <http://critique.net.nz/project/mozilla/general/interface/menus/menus.txt>]



The reasoning is that like viewing brief/normal/full headers, and like showing 

attachments in-line/as links, these prefs are things you want to be able to turn 

on and off quickly -- rather than having to dive into the prefs dialog just to 

turn highlight styles off temporarily because it's too distracting in an 

individual message (for example).



As for `anything else ... we can toss or move' in the `Mail & Newsgroups' and 

`Messages' categories, I can give you a bucketful.



* Get rid of the `Remember last selected message' pref -- unless you can provide

  evidence that at least 10 percent of users would both (a) benefit from being

  able to turn this feature off, and (b) care enough about it to change the pref.



* Get rid of the `Confirm when moving folders to the Trash' pref. Deliberately

  moving folders to the Trash is going to be done so infrequently by the vast

  majority of users, that always having a confirmation dialog for it will not be

  a problem. So the flexibility/complexity ratio is too low for this pref to

  stay.



* Ditch the Messenger Start Page feature -- can anyone seriously say that using

  a three-pane mail window for Web browsing is better than using a browser

  window? Obviously Netscape will want to keep the start page for their version,

  but even there the relevant prefs could be reduced to just a checkbox for

  turning it on/off -- I can't imagine users wanting to do anything else to the

  Messenger start page besides turning it off (or on).



* Get rid of the `start my reply above/below the quoted text' pref ... Well, ok,

  maybe you couldn't get away with that. But this pref wasn't present in 1.x,

  2.x, 3.x, or 4.0x up to 4.03. And the mere fact that it's possible to set

  replies to be above the quoted text causes great difficulty in reading a

  message, where *any* of the people quoted in the message have this pref set to

  `above the quoted text'. And the difficulty in following the conversation

  increases geometrically in proportion to the number of messages quoted. (Which

  is why on Usenet, replying above the quoted text is the equivalent of wearing a

  `kick me' sign.)



* Remove the ability to `Add html styles to structured phrases' for *outgoing*

  messages. If the reader of an *incoming* message wants to see styled structured

  phrases, they'll set the relevant pref at their end -- enforcing it from the

  sender's end is just impolite. In addition, adding HTML styles only works in

  HTML messages, and in HTML messages there are more elegant ways of adding HTML

  styles than by typing *xyz* or /xyz/. (Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I, anybody?)

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Initial request by Ben Goodger is a DUP. Maybe Matthew can find/file another bug
for his sugestions.

My opinion to some comments here:
Alecf, I don't like the emoticons prefs either - I think, it doesn't deserve
this screen space.

Matthew,
- I even less think, this deserves a menu. I think, you're in vast minority
wanting auch a menu (at least for the emoticons features). You know XUL, patch
your version to your pleasure.
- The start page could be about:blank by default, but this feature could be very
helpful in an intranet, where users often check mail (and see this page) and a
server provides "breaking news". Note, that you can open a link in a browser
window with the context menu or, on Unix, button-2 mouseclick (once these are
implemented).
-
> Remove the ability to `Add html styles to structured phrases' for *outgoing*
> messages"
This feature is for *HTML* msgs. In this case, we have no way to recognize the
structed phrases, because we trust on the sender to do a meaningful formatting.
This behaviour equals the URL recognition in 4.x: At reading time for plain text
and at sending time for HTML.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 31753 ***

Comment 8

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Actually, my comments on simplifying prefs are gradually being assembled at
<http://critique.net.nz/project/mozilla/prefs/tardis/>. I'll file a bug for them 
once they're semi-finished. (And no, I don't know XUL ... yet.:-)

Verifying dup. I should have noticed this was a dup earlier, actually, given that 
bug 31753 is on my Personal Toolbar ...