272912 - After clicking on a folder the focus must move to the right pane to the first mail

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[murali dharan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: thunderbird: version 0.9 (20041103)

The flow of using the interface usually is:

o i click on Inbox folder or anyother folder
o i want to scroll down the messages in the message list (right pane) to see
what mails i have. i often use Home and End keys since i may have sorted the
mail in different ways.

I believe this is the natural way atleast for a lot of folks. The enemies tool
(Outlook) does this by default for example.

It will be nice if such a focus policy is offered atleast as a user preference
if you do not agree that this should be the default way to handle the mail
interface.

The user preference could be probably stated as:

Mail browsing style: 
   o After clicking on a folder
        o  focus moves to the first mail in the right pane
        o  focus remains in the Folders list
        o  focus moves to the mail open in the bottom  pane


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[murali dharan]

Currently the behavior is:
After clicking on a folder, the focus stays in the Folder list. So pressing a
down arrow moves the cursor to the next folder. 

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
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Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.

Comment 4

[murali dharan]

im still interested in this

Comment 5

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

I thinks this is wrong.

If the focus move automatically on the right pane on first mail, how can you use popup menu on folder (e.g. "compact", "property", etc).

I thisk this should be INVALID.

Reporter, any comment on this?

Comment 6

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Marco, any issues with accessibility wrt. this proposed enh?

Comment 7

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Hi Gary, I have a massive issue with this. For any keyboard user, jumping focus just because of selecting a folder is an absolute nightmare, IMO. For blind people especially, because they usually first need to hear the folder navigated to. Pulling the focus away from the folder list automatically is simply going to be a no-go for productivity. And BTW: I hated Outlook for doing it big time when I still had to do it.

If you want to do a special mouse interaction model that is separate from the keyboard, that could be discussion-worthy. But since usually clicking on a folder means the same as selecting it via the arrow keys, for keyboardists this should never ever happen!

Comment 8

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

RESO WONTFIX per the many accessibility issues this will cause. Thanks Marco for comment #7. Reporter, please see comment #7 on why this will never be implemented.

Comment 9

[Pete Riley]

Despite the bug title, I think the gist of this feature request is to put more intelligence into which message is scrolled to, selected, and shown in the message pane when navigating to a folder.  It seems to me that if this happens and focus remains in the folder pane then keyboard users (myself included) and everyone could be happy.

There's already a 500 ms or so delay when using the down-arrow key to navigate folders so there would be no unnecessary drawing of the message list.

As an example:

If there are unread messages then automatically select and show the oldest or newest unread (depending on if the messages are sorted by ascending or descending date, respectively).  Otherwise select and show the newest read message.

Of course that would have to take into account the pref mailnews.remember_selected_message, perhaps by only considering this pref if the user has already visited this folder in this session (which I believe is already how it works).