363192 - When top bar of prefs window has focus, it should show focus rectangle

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 334370

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Jason Spiro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20061208 Minefield/3.0a1
Build Identifier: version 3 alpha 1 (20061208)

It is hard to tell when the top bar of the Tools -> Options (the white bar with icons labeled General, Display, Composition, etc.) has focus.  There is no visual feedback to show when it is focused.

IMO a good solution would be to show a focus rectangle around the currently selected item on the bar (e.g. General) when it has focus.

This is the Thunderbird equivalent of Firefox bug 334370 "Pane icons in options dialog should display visible focus rectangle". It is also the equivalent of Sunbird bug 363193.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

I looked over the related Firefox bug and I have to admit I don't really understand the issue. It looks like work on that bug has stalled.

Jason, are you sure you have the bug description correct here? The top bar for me has very clear focus indication. I suspect the firefox bug is talking about the tabs which appear under the top bar. For example if you try the composition preferences in tbird you'll see tabs "General" "Addressing" and "Spelling".

I'm not finding any problems with the focus indication or tab navigation in Thunderbird's preferences options. I recommend closing this as works for me if there is no objection.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

No, it's not about those tabs - if anyone had bothered with steps to reproduce, they would have been:

1. Open the pref window
2. Click Attachments, because that's the only way you'll be sure focus is there
3. Press the left arrow key, you switch to the Privacy pane, press the right arrow key, you go back to Attachments
4. Press tab a couple of times, go get something to eat, come back, and try to determine how many times you need to press shift-tab before the arrow keys will change panes, rather than doing something random and unexpected like changing your selected value in a radiogroup.

However, as the code in the patch in bug 334370 makes clear, it's not a per-app issue, it's an issue with the prefwindow widget itself, so it doesn't need more than one bug.