417009 - Pin / always on top for compose window

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Kelv]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

Sometimes when composing an e-mail it is necessary to refer to windows from other applications that are open. For some users less adept at alt/tab or navigating a busy task bar, it might be useful to be able to pin the compose window / toggle it as always on top.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Compose a new message.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
When switching to other windows, the compose window can become obscured.

Expected Results:  
If a toggle button were introduced to have the compose window always on top, the user could then pin the message they are composing to the foreground while they glance at other windows.

Comment 1

[KR]

In TB3B2, this issue still happens but differently. When you click on a mailTo: link, a compose window opens up but it stays behind the active window and you got to do an Alt-Tab to get this to focus.

To reproduce this:
1. Open Shredder.
2. Open firefox and open the Link:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_mailto
3. IN the Website Content should be the below text:
          Your Results
          This is a mail link: Send Mail
4. The Send Mail should be a mailTo: link, Click on that link.
5. The compose window opens up but it is not the Active Window in focus.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

It's a nice idea, but, realistically, comment 1 should be realized as an addon, especially because we're going to have compose in a tab (one day...), so compose /windows/ will no longer be the default and thus have less attention (-> wontfix),
and comment 2 is something handled by the OS, I think (-> wfm).
Blake?

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

In fact, it might even be technically prevented by the OS nowadays to keep a window alwas on top of all other windows, because the dangers of abuse are too high.

This hasn't seen any interest, and apart from the very-long-term perspective of compose-in-a-tab (which reduces the need for this), as a workaround, the goal of this bug can be achieved by placing compose window side-by-side with other application windows.

If this can be realized in an addon we could consider taking for core, otherwise I wouldn't want to waste precious resources on this.

Comment 1 should be considered for followup bug if still the case (for me, mailto: links do not currently work at all iirc).