466697 - Different tabs should allow different account collapse/expand state in folder pane

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Toolbars and Tabs, defect)

Description

[Joshua Nixon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1) Gecko/20081007 Firefox/3.1b1
Build Identifier: 

Thunderbird should allow different mail tabs to display different folder panel view settings. Currently any change to folder view in Tab A also affects Tab B. This is confusing.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Thunderbird with two accounts, create tabs for inbox for account 1 (open in Tab A) and inbox for account 2 (in Tab B).
2. While in Tab B, folder tree for account 1 is collapsed in the folder panel.
3. Switch back to Tab A. Look at folder tree n folder panel.
Actual Results:  
The folder panel tree view is identical in both tabs. Collapsing or expanding tree in one tab also collapses or expands it in all tabs.

Note: Selected folder is NOT affected (as it is in bug 392330) unless collapsing hides the folder, in which case view correctly reverts to the parent folder.

Expected Results:  
Changing view in one tab should not change the view in all tabs.

There is no reason the view settings should be linked between tabs. If they must be linked, the folder panel should NOT be part of the mail window tab: If it looks like two separate instances, it should behave that way; if they are separate, the folder panels should show separate behaviors.

Unless the folder panel is clearly a separate entity and not part of the tab, collapsing a folder tree in Tab A should not also collapse that tree in Tab B. If the folder panel is a separate entity, it should be maintained as such and not linked to the tabs, as is done with the Sidebar in Firefox.

This is NOT the same as bug 392330: while it might be related, the issue is different.

Comment 1

[Joshua Nixon]

Sorry about that: Build ID didn't paste correctly.
Bug noted on: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081125 Shredder/3.0b1pre ID:20081125030123

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

pretty funky.
deferring to bienvenu

Comment 3

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Marking as NEW and blocking, after some IRC discussion.  I suspect this falls out of the other work that asuth is already doing on tabs related to Gloda, so starting off by giving it to him.

Comment 4

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

UX decision: folder pane state is per-tab, or global?

Comment 5

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Between not being able to persist open/closed folders and accounts, and not being able to persist having the folderpane itself open or collapsed, I just don't use tabs anymore. Eventually they all turn into the same thing, just another everything 3pane, so I don't bother and just stay in a single 3pane.

Comment 6

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

i'm pretty sure we talked about per-tab making the most sense, that actually allows tabs to keep the different state they need.  eventually when tab restore exists this folder pane state should be saved as well so everything remains exactly as it was left.

Comment 7

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

My changes for bug 474701 do not improve the folder pane situation and are not going to.

Comment 8

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

This will get fixed by whatever bug we use to implement non-multiplexed tabs.  Not sure what bug that is, though.

Comment 10

[u197037]

Another thing to consider - possibility to show different accounts in different tabs, decreasing the length of the leftmost tree. 
Or, at least make it protocol-based (Mail/News/RSS) tabs, avoiding pretty long tree of accounts and folders in the left sidebar.

This way is definitely not a default behaviour, but improve usability for people with lots of [different protocols and] accounts.

Comment 12

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The Thunderbird drivers wish to release Thunderbird 3 as soon as possible. As a
result, we feel that this bug shouldn't stand in the way of all the other good
work getting into the hands of users sooner rather than later. Therefore we are
retargeting it for 3.1. See http://ccgi.standard8.plus.com/blog/archives/242
for more details. The 3.1 release is expected to be a quick release soon after
Thunderbird 3.

Comment 13

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

This would be great, and we'd love to have it, so setting the unversioned wanted-thunderbird+ flag.  That said, if this were the last bug standing, we wouldn't hold Thunderbird 3.1 to get it, so setting blocking-3.1: to minus.

Comment 14

[philexx]

this would be great to have. it looks like there hasn't been any progress for quite a while now. is there any hope that this might be implemented?

Comment 15

[Joshua Nixon]

No change in behavior as of Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130107 Thunderbird/17.0.2 ID:20130107124236.

Main reason for requesting this is that implementation opens the ability to maintain multiple Inboxes in separate tabs; right now this isn't possible without scrolling. If list of subfolders exceeds height of window, it becomes difficult to view multiple inboxes at once. Separating accounts into tabs would help resolve this, but until or unless this is fixed it is difficult to work with the view.

Comment 16

[Lewis Rosenthal]

I also see this on SeaMonkey (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0 SeaMonkey/2.30), so I would vote to change this to MailNews:Message Display, and not only TB, unless the underlying cause is different (and I have not looked at the code at all).

Comment 17

[Ottmar Timotheus]

Bug still persists (45.5.1)! Is it so hard to realize folder pane state per-tab instead of global? It just makes no sense of having the option to open accounts in new tabs with global folder pane state!