Closed Bug 471014 Opened 15 years ago Closed 15 years ago

Remove useless unmoving throbbers in compose and addressbook windows

Categories

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

defect
Not set
trivial

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED FIXED
Thunderbird 3.0b2

People

(Reporter: cameron.murray, Assigned: philor)

Details

(Keywords: useless-UI)

Attachments

(1 file)

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081223 Shredder/3.0b2pre

A spinning wheel icon appears in the write new email dialog at the right hand side. It appears regardless of activity but doesnt actually spin.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Write new email
Actual Results:  
Spinning wheel appears

Expected Results:  
Should this icon be hidden unless there is activity?
(In reply to comment #0)
> Expected Results:  
> Should this icon be hidden unless there is activity?

No, it is the same as the main mail window and address book windows - it "spins" when there is activity, and stays static when there isn't.

I think this is won't fix, but cc'ing our User Experience guy to make sure he's happy.
Duplicate of bug 242669, which probably should have been wontfix rather than invalid (we *could* have a frozen state that only appears during customization, we just don't want to), though I find bug 242669 comment 3 pretty persuasive, that if you're going to fake an inactive state for the Mac native throbber which doesn't have one, turning it all a flat even gray is a better idea than faking the state of the Mac throbber on a hung system.
I do think we're over using the spinning.  Mark, what is the activity that this is trying to indicate?  Saving a draft?  The throbber should only be used to warn people of slow performance i.e. possible wait times.  Otherwise the activity doesn't really need indications, many people will stop at the throbber and wait for it to finish like waiting for a web page to load; which is not what we want.

> though I find bug 242669 comment 3 pretty persuasive,
> that if you're going to fake an inactive state for the Mac native throbber
> which doesn't have one, turning it all a flat even gray is a better idea than
> faking the state of the Mac throbber on a hung system.

Agreed, the 1/2 way throbber does not look in the inactive state as much as a half thought.
Oy frickin' vey. Since I had to learn this, I'm jolly well going to share it at you.

Since M18, the dawn of mailnews, compose and addressbook have had throbbers. They both have (and Thunderbird's forks had, until they were removed when the link was removed) a child observes element (which is totally bogus, since you only use that when you want to be able to just observe a subset of the broadcaster's attributes, which makes no sense when the broadcaster only has the one attribute to observe) which says that they observe a broadcaster with the id "broadcaster_throbber" with an underscore.

There is no such broadcaster, nor has there ever been. The ab has a broadcaster with the id "broadcaster-throbber" with a hyphen, with the single attribute "busy" which nothing ever changes or successfully observes. The compose window has a broadcaster with the id "Editor:Throbber" with the single attribute "busy" which nothing ever changes or observes (though prior to the pointless change from bug 50968 it had a pointless "broadcaster-throbber" which nothing ever changed or successfully observed).

The other way to spin up a throbber, rather than changing a broadcaster which only one thing tries and fails to observe, is to just directly set the "busy" attribute. mailWindow.js does that in mail windows, when something calls into StartMeteors(), but mailWindow.js isn't included in either compose or the ab.

So, bottom line, for 9 years plus two months, the addressbook and mail compose windows have had throbbers which have never, once, under any circumstances, throbbed. I can't think of a clearer sign that we don't need them.
Assignee: nobody → philringnalda
Status: UNCONFIRMED → ASSIGNED
Ever confirmed: true
Attachment #354439 - Flags: review?(bugzilla)
Keywords: useless-UI
OS: Mac OS X → All
Hardware: x86 → All
Target Milestone: --- → Thunderbird 3.0b2
Version: unspecified → Trunk
Forgot to mention the CSS change while I was frothing about the throbbers themselves: I expected there to be some CSS for the throbbers, but all I found was that Pinstripe rule for the throbber in Firefox's sidebar, which I think we can probably get along without.
Summary: Spinning wheel appears in write new email regardless of activity → Remove useless unmoving throbbers in compose and addressbook windows
Attachment #354439 - Flags: review?(bugzilla) → review+
http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/2854a16a867f
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
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