441062 - After selecting recipient type (To|CC|Bcc etc.), focus should be automatically redirected/moved to recipient entry field

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[John O. Kopf]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.14 (20080421)

When sending a message (Email OR news), if one wants to change the message TYPE field one selects from a menu that contains To, CC, BCC, etc.  However, selecting changes to focus of the window TO that menu, and one must then manually move the focus back to the field used to enter the address.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.select an item from the menu.
2.Then go back and manually select the address field (even if that was the focus previously!)
3.


Expected Results:  
The focus should remain wherever it was at the time of making the menu selection; it should NOT be redirected to the menu itself.

In the old Netscape, you could change from TO to CC or BCC and immediately continue typing the address without having to manually re-select the field.

Very annoying to one used to the old way.

Comment 1

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

Confirmed using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/2008080600 Shredder/3.0b1pre on WinXP.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

STR

1 Composition with focus in recipient field where you can enter To-recipient
2 click on "To" to open Recipient-Type dropdown
3 select another recipient type (using mouse), e.g. "CC"
4 want to continue entering recipient address for "CC"

Actual result

3 focus stays in recipient-type dropdown
4 you have to press tab once to refocus recipient entry field
(imho, that's correct and expected behaviour, so this is an enhancement, not a bug)

Expected result (per reporter's comment 0)

3 reporter wants that after selecting a new recipient type, we should programatically move the focus back to recipient entry field, so after selecting the new type, users don't have to press <tab> to return focus to the recipient entry field
(however, imo, doing so will lose the current focus from recipient-type dropdown list, and automatically moving focus around is often asking for trouble...)


Evaluation

I can understand reporter's desire to auto-shift the focus after selecting new recipient type, but I'm very sceptical about such focus-moving behaviour.
E.g. at the moment, you can shift-tab from recipient entry field into recipient type list and alter recipient type by subsequent cursor down/up until you have the right recipient type (without even showing the popup). Each time you'll be selecting a new recipient type, which per this RFE would (probably?) shift focus back to recipient entry field. So in that scenario, it's a lot harder to operate.
For keyboard operation, jumping focus is certainly mostly unwanted, and splitting mouse and keyboard operation is a tricky road of which I'm not sure we want to take it.

But perhaps there can be a good solution after some more thought.
Anyway, this needs more details on the expected UI behaviour before we can consider it.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

WFM with version 78