479489 - no way to get back to main 3pane window if "activity manager" or "saved files" are the only windows left open

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Saul Tannenbaum]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090218 Lightning/1.0pre Thunderbird/3.0b2

With only the Activity Manager window open, on a Macintosh, Thunderbird's menus are reduced to only the "Thunderbird" menu, leaving no direct way to reopen the Mail/News window. Closing the Activity Manager window returns the menus to their full state and allows the reopening of the Mail/News window.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Close all windows except Mail/News and Activity Manager
2. Close Mail/News
3.
Actual Results:  
Activity Manager remains as the only window, with menus reduced to just "Thunderbird".

Expected Results:  
Some state where the Mail/News window can be directly reopened.

The reduction of the menu options happens when focus goes to the Activity Manager. This seems appropriate as few of the other options are valid. However, the Window -> Mail/News menu item should remain to allow a direct path back to it without first closing the Activity Manager window.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

On Windows, the situation is similar - closing all windows while leaving the Activity Manager open results in this window being the only one left, and there is no apparent way to reopen any of the other windows.

I'm not sure if it works on Mac OSX, but double-clicking the executable opens the main window again. The same behavior can be observed with Tools > Add-ons.

Comment 2

[David Ascher (:davida)]

Phil, this feels like a generic problem w/ what I'd call 'secondary windows'.  Is there something obvious that I should do in the invocation of the Activity Manager, or is there some other generic bit we should do somehow?

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

The generic thing is to imitate what Firefox did: put the whole main menu in browser-menubar.inc, #include it in browser.xul for every OS, #include it in macBrowserOverlay.xul, then #ifdef XP_MACOSX overlay that on every little thing like prefs and downloads that needs a menu on OS X.

Of course, life's simpler for them, because they only have a single primary windowtype, and for the closest they have to another windowtype, the bookmarks organizer, they totally cheated and put two pseudo-Action Menus in the toolbar. Us, we'll have to deal with the fact that our menus for AB, Composition, and 3pane/standalone really don't lend themselves to a Mac-style single menu where things are just enabled/disabled based on the window context.

Comment 4

[Melchert Fruitema]

There is a way actually. You can always call the main window with the key combination of hold cmd + 1.

Comment 5

[Lint Hasenpfeffer]

I can confirm this behavior. Cmd-1 just makes a system beep if the activity window is open. Clicking on the app in the dock also does not open the mailnews window.

However, I think this is realated to the larger issue of window handing in osx, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232679

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

We've decided we're not going to block on this as the other "secondary windows" have the same existing issues and the work to fix it is quite large which would delay us shipping Thunderbird 3. Therefore moving out onto the 3.1 proposed list.

Comment 8

[Mattia]

I think that this bug is still valid also in Thunderbird 8: shortcut "command + 1" doesn't work in any way for me.

Comment 9

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Mattia from comment #8)
> I think that this bug is still valid also in Thunderbird 8: shortcut
> "command + 1" doesn't work in any way for me.

Mattia (or anyone), can you try this, on current TB10, on MAC:
1) with all other TB windows closed, from Address book window, press Command+1
2) with all other TB windows closed, from message composition, press Command+1
In these two cases of motherless satellite windows, the main 3pane window should reappear (that's what it does on Windows when I press Ctrl+1, and it's even documented on the keyboard shortcuts page (1))

Unfortunately, Ctrl/Command+1 does indeed *not* work for the smaller (dialogue-style) satellite windows like "Saved Files" or "Activity Manager" (this bug).

*Proposed minimal fix for this bug:*

Enable Ctrl/Command+1 for all types of windows, including smaller (dialogue-style) satellite windows like "Saved Files" or "Activity Manager".

(1) https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts

Comment 10

[Mattia]

I made the two tests asked by Thomas and many others but shortcut "cmd + 1" doesn't work in any scenario.

Thunderbird version: 10.0.2 (tested in both 32 and 64 bit mode)
OSX version: Snow Leopard 10.6.8