425025 - No focus when Thunderbird starts

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Rod Whiteley]

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: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b5pre) Gecko/2008032502 Thunderbird/3.0a1pre

When Thunderbird starts up, focus is nowhere to be seen.  You have to press Tab to move focus to somewhere it is visible, and even then it might not be in a very useful place.

Reproducible: Always




There are really several cases to consider.

a. Thunderbird might check for new mail at startup, or you might open it to a specific folder.  In those cases you probably want to work in the Inbox or specified folder, so that's where focus should be.

b. Thunderbird might display Account Central at startup.  Focus should then be on the first link in Account Central (but see bug 425018 ), or perhaps in the folder pane.

c. Thunderbird might display an empty folder at startup.  Focus is not visible in an empty folder, and you cannot do anything there anyway, so in this case focus should be in the folder pane.

d. The folder pane might be collapsed. Focus should be on the first thing that can have focus, if there is such a thing--for example, in the quick search textbox.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

xref bug 377946 - With focus on Message Pane and no selection, <enter> should select and open the "current" message

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Blake, Marco, what is desired UI behavior here?

Focusing first account?

Comment 4

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

I believe if the message list is vislble (e. g. a folder was last selected), the focus should go to the message list, possibly to the last focused message if that's still available. In other cases it should focus the web interface (e. g. if you selected an account name in the folder list).

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

There is indeed no focus when Thunderbird starts (tested on WinXP)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1

Current (example):

STR
- default 3pane view
- coming from previous session viewing the main mail tab
- where we show "Welcome to Thunderbird/Daily" page in msg preview pane
- press TAB
- press Shift+TAB

Actual
- TAB sets focus on the handle of the first mail tab.
- Shift+TAB returns to the msg preview pane, now allowing for keyboard access to scroll the msg. So surprisingly, focus "returns" to a place where it wasn't active before (this bug).

Expected (example):

When showing welcome page in msg preview pane:
- Set focus on preview pane and enable movement keys to scroll that page
- Provide visible indication of focus, i. e. dotted focus border around msg preview.

From here, it's easy for keyboard users to get whereever they want to be:
- pressing tab will cycle the links in the welcome page
- alternatively, pressing F6 will focus folder list to pick accounts etc.
- another (second) F6 will focus the msg list to pick a msg (only unfortunately dotted focus border doesn't show there correctly in my test, after being sticky when I tabbed through! 1 or 2 bugs here).

I'm aware that this doesn't cover all the cases (hence "example"), but it's a start for the basic scenario.

Comment 6

[hestejue]

Yes, the previous versions of thunderbird at least *mostly* had the focus on the inbox message list. With version 12.0.1 this is never the case. A no-go for keyboard users. After every startup I now have to use a long winded key sequence before I can move up or down the message list. Why has this been changed?

Comment 7

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Attachment: Speculative patch

I'm not sure if this is the right way to fix this, but it seems like this works. I'm guessing that focus is getting clobbered by atStartupRestoreTabs(), so I just scheduled the thread pane focus call after that.

Comment 8

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Oh, I guess the above will fail when the account summary is selected, but assuming this is the right general strategy, that should be easy enough to add in.

Comment 9

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 630465 [details] [diff] [review]
Speculative patch

I'd be a bit concerned for the case where the machine is a bit slow and the user starts to do things as Thunderbird gets going and the focus is stolen back after they've started doing things. I've seen that a bit in the past with the compose window although I don't know what mechanism we use there. Does it need to be on a timeout? Could you just call it direct?

Comment 11

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Still no visible or helpful focus at application startup on 98.0a1 (2022-01-20) (64-bit), Win10.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bug 1698816 ?