393666 - Figure out the story for mail tab behavior prefs.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

As Phil points out over in Bug 393312, now that we've forked the tabbrowser code into thunderbird, we've picked up various browser tab behavior prefs like: browser.tabs.closeButtons

we need to decide quite quickly which of these tab prefs we want to support and if we do support them, we should rename the prefs with a mail prefix.

Let me know if you are interested in poking at this Phil.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Well, .tabMinWidth, .tabMaxWidth and .tabClipWidth are easy calls - we'd have to have magic numbers for them anyway, and there's no sense not having those magic numbers in hidden prefs (among other things, themes can set prefs, can't they?). So, .closeButtons.

I really wanted to give it the axe, since my offhand memory of it was as a nod to Fx 1.5.0.x users who couldn't stand having their food bowl moved (I used it myself that way for a while). But, there are valid use-cases for all the values:

Active-tab-only makes sense if you do a lot of accidental clicking (I know people with Parkinsons, and people with awful laptop trackpads), or if you typically bounce between having just enough tabs to hit ClipWidth and just enough to not, and don't want the buttons jumping in and out all the time.

No close buttons makes sense if you never use a mouse, or need every pixel of title width and are willing to use the context menu when you close with the mouse, or if you open six folders in tabs, and then never close them.

One at the end makes sense if your typical use of tabs is to open seven different messages bidding on one contract, jump around comparing them, then close all seven and open five different messages bidding on another contract, then close all of them.

Tabbed browsing may be mature enough to say that the dominant use matches all-until-ClipWidth, but tabbed mail really isn't, and the more I think about it, the more I think we need to keep them all (and unbreak 3, which doesn't work on any platform, and doesn't even show an image in Qute), and much as I hate the thought, consider visible prefs UI.

And I was *so* hoping to delete something.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: Full meal deal v.1

But, I do see other things in the prefs file I can delete, to get over the disappointment :)

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 278732 [details] [diff] [review]
Full meal deal v.1

this looks good Phil. Thanks for fixing this up.

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

mail/app/profile/all-thunderbird.js 1.98
mail/base/content/tabmail.xml 1.5

Comment 5

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Filed bug 396004 for making closebuttons=3 actually work, since I haven't managed to quite figure it out yet.