366735 - Need option for new mail notification window fade

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Swil]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: version 2 beta 1 (20061206)

The content of the new mail notification window popup fades in when the box appears - this is very sluggish on my PC (a 1Ghz P3 with 384Mb of RAM) and ultimately unnecessary. Can there be an option to switch off the fading?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Wait for new mail
2. Watch mail notification window pop up
Actual Results:  
Content of new mail notification window fades in really sluggishly

Expected Results:  
To see what new mail I have

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Confirming RFE. I guess this could be an issue on slower machines...

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

xref bug 367431 New Mail alert popup takes 100% CPU for 10 secs

Comment 3

[Ghee Teo]

This is also caused a considerable problem when running on a thin client environment such as Sun Ray. Doing a fading effect causes many round trips between the client and the server.

See OpenSolaris bug http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=14555 for details. 

The version of thunderbird is 
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS i86pc; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100226 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.1

Comment 4

[Brian Cameron]

This is an issue when you connect to the desktop over the network (e.g. XDMCP, remote X, etc.) you can have a slow network connection and the painting of the animation fade can be very very slow if the network has high latency, such as when you connect to a desktop remotely over a long distance.

As Ghee points out, this is also an issue for Sun Ray, but I wanted to point out that this is a more general problem than Sun Ray or thin clients (which tend to use XDMCP or other remote desktop interfaces).

Waiting a long period of time just to see a notification is painful, It would be good if users could configure thunderbird to simply avoid the animation entirely, or for sysadmins who run networks where people use XDMCP to set a systemwide configuration to make thunderbird more useful.

Comment 5

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Patch for bug 355846 introduced a new preference: alerts.disableSlidingEffect which, when set to "true" didn't animate popup notifications. It was made for Firefox, but added to Toolkit, so any product could use it. Some later modifications to code changed its usage, but it is still there and working on the mail-news codebase.

Try it and set preference to "true". You may use the Config Editor to do that.

Once tried, could you post here if that worked? Thank you, Swil.

Comment 6

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Fixed with bug 355846.