448694 - Remove UI for "Remember the last selected message" (mailnews.remember_selected_message)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect, P4)

Description

[Martin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: 

It is not very logic that "Remember the last selected message" is hidden in the Advanced tab. Compared to the other options in there, this option is no where near "advanced".

I therefore propose that is it moved to Edit->Preferences->Display->General.

See mock up.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Martin]

Attachment: Mock up

Comment 2

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

IMHO, no need to move this, as it is more advanced, meaning most people won't really want, or care to change. Martin, maybe you should read this: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/ue/philosophy/realities.html. Though targeted to FF, it applies to TB.

Comment 3

[Martin]

To Comment #2

It is an interesting read, but seams to deal about selecting good default values.

As the document says "Our users do not want to invest huge amounts of time learning new commands, new and complicated UI, etc.", and Thunderbird really is a nightmere, when it comes to configuration.

E.g. it is very confusing that there are 2 Settings menus; Preferences and Account Settings, that seams to deal with almost the same.

And to top it off, right clicking on the folder pane, gives a menu with many options, and left clicking on an account title gives a new settings page. And from there the Account Settings can also be reached.

I think there is a usability problem here.

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I'd agree that we need to remove this option from the ui.  It should be on by default and isn't that useful when turned off.  

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Updating summary, completely agree. I don't see the reason anyone wouldn't want this.

Comment 6

[Ronald Killmer]

The pref has some value with news.  When the pref is true it causes the highlight to not goto the newest header fetched. If anything this is a pref I would rather see being a per-account, or best deal a per-group pref for the News Reader side of Tb.

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't see that, going into a folder i didn't visit that session no message is selected.

Comment 8

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

See bug 452440 comment 1 for my thoughts on why this preference shouldn't be necessary.  I think we can remove it and still allow people to have a similar, but better experience.  

Comment 9

[Ronald Killmer]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I don't see that, going into a folder i didn't visit that session no message is
> selected.
> 

You are right. I also have mailnews.scroll_to_new_message set to false. It looks like what I see is this second pref.  I spent time testing the remember pref and could not see any difference in header list display in the Moz support groups.  It always opened to the top of the list (Order Received, Desending, threaded).

Comment 10

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I don't care if you take the preference out of the UI, but I *STRONGLY* do not want to lose the capability.  Message rendering, especially when all or some of the message content is offline, is too slow and, IMO, too distracting.

Comment 11

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

> I don't care if you take the preference out of the UI, but I *STRONGLY* do not
> want to lose the capability.

This bug shouldn't be removing the preference capability, only the pref UI from the main preferences window.  In fact, in various bugs ( bug 448288 and bug 452440 ) I've talked about how this should be the default.  Even how it should be remembered across sessions.  However I think this preference needs to be displayed and interacted with in a better manner.

Comment 12

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Attachment: proposed fix

Remove the UI.

Comment 13

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

changeset:   499:410f5ead898e
http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/410f5ead898e

->FIXED