381821 - No Horizontal scrollbar in threadpane.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Peter Ekkerman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Rogers Hi-Speed Internet; TheFreeDictionary.com; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.0

No Horizontal Scrollbar is created when the Threadpane(s)like Inbox,Unsent,Sent
Drafts etc have many columns and exceed window width (screenwidth)
Related:Double-click on divider between column headers will not resize column.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Start Thunderbird and check each folder.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Same as in Details

Expected Results:  
Horizontal Scrollbar should have been created.
Columns should have been resized.

To me these are bugs,however since this has been going on for many previous versions,it seems that nobody has bothered to correct this.
Which is surprising,since these are basic window elements.
Whenever there is an overflow,either vertically or horizontally,the coding should call for the respective scrollbars to be created.
The same goes for resizing the columns.
Again a basic feature that should have been corrected (implemented)
a long time ago.
A "Resize All" feature would only be a logical extension of this.

Comment 1

[Walter Tabax]

The same for me.

Comment 2

[Maximilian Mehnert]

This is definitely something that would easy life a lot!

Comment 3

[zug_treno]

(In reply to comment #0)
> No Horizontal Scrollbar is created when the Threadpane(s)like Inbox,Unsent,Sent
> Drafts etc have many columns and exceed window width (screenwidth)

Related to/duplicate of Core bug 265571? 

> Related:Double-click on divider between column headers will not resize column.

Duplicate of Core bug 155510.

Comment 4

[Maximilian Mehnert]

Despite it being almost two years old, I really consider this a bug.
It's quite annoying to have e.g. a LKML thread that cannot be rendered due to the threadpane being too narrow. 
Also, I have at least one or two columns that I have to (re)shrink to an unreadable width all the time.

It would all be much easier to handle with horizontal scrolling.

The same is true for the tree pane where I would rather like to be able to scroll so see the full name of a newsgroup than to see something I cannot read anyway.

Comment 5

[nrona]

It's a big problem of the new release.
There isn't an Horizontal Scrollbar, I can't adjust the column with and see the columns after "Date".

Comment 6

[Peter Ekkerman]

I was the one that started this particular thread and it's now more than 1½ yr
later.Thunderbird is now at v3.0 and this flaw is still not fixed.
This is absolutely friggin' stupid.
Is there nobody in the Thunderbird/Mozilla community that can design a normal windows form? One where a scrollbar is created on overflow?
Unbelievable!!!!
And you want me to promote Thunderbird? If even basic elements can't be designed?

Comment 7

[Rob McMillin]

Just found this after upgrading to Fedora Core 12 and Thunderbird 3.0. UNBELIEVABLE. This should really be a show-stopper, as it makes the entire user interface unusable.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Eric, Joe, is this also seen in support forums?

(I've actually seen a horiz scroll bar once, but it was caused by bug or add-on iirc)

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I cannot reproduce this issue using version 68 on windows

Comment 10

[chrizilla]

I can reproduce this issue on Win10-64bit in:
TB 115.6.1 (64-bit)
TB 129.0a1 (2024-06-28) (64-bit)

Comment 12

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

We're not allowing horizontal scrolling in the thread pane.
Please don't reopen 5 years old bugs.

Comment 13

[chrizilla]

I don't understand why. If a WFM bug can be reproduced, it is expected to be reopened, no?

There have been many users (see above) requesting this feature. So if the team has decided against it, it's a good thing to communicate this in this bug.

Comment 14

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

The WFM original flag was incorrect, indeed.

This is a feature that was requested pretty much at the beginning of Thunderbird and never implemented because it adds many usability and readability problems.
Allowing the thread pane to scroll horizontally means that each folder could have a completely different horizontal size, with various columns overflowing outside the visible viewport.
Horizontal scroll is not as easy and natural as vertical scroll so it's not as intuitive and accessible.
This might sound like a "good" feature for some users, but the majority of users don't expect this behaviour and it's not something common in other email clients. Comparing this behaviour to other software or file managers is a wrong exercise.

To add to the pure UX reasons, we have an average of 20 million users per month.
This bug was opened 17 years ago, and it has only 4 votes, 10 comments, and 1 duplicate. Saying that "many users are requesting this feature" is pretty inaccurate.

Comment 15

[chrizilla]

@ [:aleca]: Yes, WFM was definitely incorrect (as it would have meant that a horizontal scrollbar was existing and working). I supsected that and I also suspected that this functionality is not planned. But speculations don't matter, it had to go on record officially. And I cannot WONTFIX myself, as this decision is done by you and your team. So I did the only thing possible. I even had the foresight to CC you here and add a dependency to a bug you are working on and for which it has implications. I don't really think I could have done much more ...
As said above, I think it's very helpful to have an official statement by a team member here explaining why such a key feature is not wanted by the team. This way other and future requests can be referred here. I have already done so today (here).

we have an average of 20 million users per month.
This bug was opened 17 years ago, and it has only 4 votes, 10 comments, and 1 duplicate.
Saying that "many users are requesting this feature" is pretty inaccurate.

I said "There have been many users (see above) requesting this feature." I meant and specifically referred (in the part you left out of my quote) to the many users who meetooed above in this bug. I did not intend to infer anything beyond that.
But now that you mention it: I respectfully disagree that it's "inaccurate". I have read countless bug reports, that's a relatively high number. You really cannot compare bug votes to the figure of 20 million monthly users. By this arithmetic, no bug here would have any importance whatsoever because the most popular TB bug has 223 votes, which is 0,001 % of 20 million users ...

Comment 16

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

I'm going to temporarily reopen this and share a try build with an experimental feature to allow horizontal scrolling on threads.
We're gonna use it for some UX tests and user feedback, but there's no expectation that this will turn into a core feature.

Comment 17

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Attachment: Bug 381821 - Add a preference to allow horizontal scrolling on table view. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Comment 18

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Look at us, fixing 18 years old bugs

Comment 19

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/99153f1fa3c2
Add a preference to allow horizontal scrolling on table view. r=tobyp,darktrojan