44388 - Switch Themes button should be removed

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 44032

(SeaMonkey :: Themes, defect, P3)

Description

[Phil Peterson]

Using 2000-06-30-09 commercial build on NT

1. Bring up prefs dialog
2. Click on Themes item under Appearance
3. Click a different theme in the listbox
4. Click OK

Expected: theme to switch
Actual: theme does not switch unless you first press the Switch Theme pushbutton

I think it would be better if we didn't have this button because:

1. The rest of the Appearance items do not have an Apply button, and they have
similar impact on the UI to switching themes
2. It doesn't make sense to me to allow the user to switch themes, and then
click the Cancel button, and have nothing happen.

Comment 1

[Phil Peterson]

-> ben

Comment 2

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

I'm not quite sure what the resolution for this should be. It looks like 
german is cc'ed anyway so he can comment on the direction we've 
chosen for this panel pre and post nsbeta2. 

Here's my take anyway:

- The apply theme button should remain as it allows the user to preview a 
theme live without closing the preferences dialog. 

I'm not sure whether or not the selection should be applied when the OK 
button is pressed. I think that this may make it too easy to do this sort of 
thing:

- select a theme in the list to preview information about it (e.g. preview 
graphic, author, etc) then hit "OK"  without actually intending to apply this 
theme. 

I think the best action here is to provide additional information in this list, 
e.g. a tristate checkbox showing whether a skin was in effect or not, or 
partially in effect. If you want to use a theme, click the checkbox to check it 
and make it apply to everything that it can. 

The third state of the checkbox is only displayed when the skin is 
incompletely applied (e.g. classic is applied to Mail/News and Editor, but 
not Navigator, which is using "Pokemon") [ need to write a spec'n up 
describing the skin switching UI post beta2]

Changes to these checkboxes would be applied when the user clicked 
Apply or OK'ed the prefs dialog. 

Now that everyone's suitably confused, I'll click Commit. 

Comment 3

[Phil Peterson]

> I think that this may make it too easy to do this sort of thing:
>
> - select a theme in the list to preview information about it (e.g. preview
> graphic, author, etc) then hit "OK"  without actually intending to apply this
> theme.

But, none of the rest of the prefs work that way. We should at least be consistent.

Comment 4

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

german? 

Comment 5

[german]

Form seeing this being used for a few weeks now inhouse (and seeing people being 
furstrated) I would tend to agree with Phil on this. Too many people seem to be 
expecting it to behave like other prefs (and I have found myself using it that 
way too, even though I should have 'known' better).

Comment 6

[Jason Eager]

I personally disagree with making the theme switching "automatic", but if we
decide to make this change, then we shouldn't land this change UNTIL theme
switching isn't nearly as troublesome (Losing pages, etc)

Comment 7

[Paul Wyskoczka]

Updating QA Contact to [e-mail]

Comment 8

[Kent Thuresson]

IMO the main problem here is that you can't deduce the function of a button by 
its name, so why not just change the names?

Here's my suggestion:

"apply theme" - "preview"
"OK" ---------- "apply theme"
"cancel" ------ "cancel"
 

Comment 9

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 44032 ***

Comment 10

[Stephen Walker]

vrfy dup