372717 - Implement less-hacky technique for F6-tabbing

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

At bug 364768, Neil posted a patch for the Seamonkey compose window with this comment:
> a variant of the patch in bug 236219 but with a slightly less hacky
> workaround for window.content.focus().

He's right, the technique in his patch *is* less hacky, and TB should be using that in both the compose window and the 3-pane.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Attachment: diff -u vs. TB 2.0pre-0302

This patch changes the technique of setting focus on the message pane (in the 
3-pane) and the message body (in the compose window) to use the method
  advanceFocusIntoSubtree()
rather than the two-step process used previously.  It also does a little bit of comment clean-up in SwitchPaneFocus() which refers to an older state when the search bar was a separate "pane" internally.

There is a slight visible improvement here in that now, shifting focus to the message pane using F6/Ctrl+Tab will cause the canvas focus ring to be displayed; without this patch, that ring is only displayed using plain Tab (or Shift+Tab).  

The ring is not displayed (with or without this patch) if the message pane gets focus by a mouse-click, which is perhaps a problem; Neil seemed to imply that this behavior was by design.

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 257387 [details] [diff] [review]
diff -u vs. TB 2.0pre-0302

Let's see if we can get this checked in tonight. It sounds like you made the patch against the branch and tested it there already.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Let's see if we can get this checked in tonight. It sounds like you made the
> patch against the branch and tested it there already.

I did test on branch, yes.  I'm not able to check in, however, if you intended that first sentence for me...

Comment 4

[Scott MacGregor]

It was a note to myself to get this landed tonight :)

thanks for the patch Mike!