482155 - Items in Help menu take action instead of providing help

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Help Documentation, defect)

Description

[Joachim Kock]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090223 Thunderbird/3.0b2

Suppose you notice a new "Archive" menu item in the Message menu,
and you don't know what it is supposed to mean.
Go to the Help menu and type the first few letters; this makes
the word "Archive" appear in the Help menu, in the Menu Items
section. When you click on it, instead of getting help regarding
what it means, the action is taken.

In general, the reporter considers it a bug that looking up things
in the Help menu can trigger an action. The user ought to be
able to freely browse the Help menu, without fear of 
triggering some action (just as your car should not start to
drive just because you look up "speeder" in the driver's manual).



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Search for "Archive" in the Help menu
2. Click on the "Archive" menu item that appears in the Help menu
3.
Actual Results:  
The "Archive" action is taken

Expected Results:  
Help regarding the term "Archive"

If the above steps are performed slowly, you will notice
that hovering the mouse over the "Archive" menu item
in the Help menu will open the Message menu, with some
arrows pointing at the menu item you were looking for
help about.

This indicates that the intention of the Help menu in this case 
is not to provide help on what "Archive" means and entails, but
is rather meant as help to the user who already knows what 
"Archive" means, but can't figure out where the menu
item is!

Even for such a user there is no reason why selecting the
menu item inside the Help menu should trigger the action.
The whole point of the mechanism is to point the user to the
appropriate place: the user can now move the pointer to
the other menu and select the item he was looking for ---
if indeed he was looking for it to click on it.

The correct behaviour of the Help menu upon selection of an 
item referring to a menu item in another menu would rather be
to close the Help menu, leaving the referred menu open, thereby
telling the user "now I have told you all you need to know, now go
and click, and good luck --- goodbye".

(It is another issue that it would be great to have more content
in the Help menu...)

Cheers,
Joachim.

Comment 1

[Joachim Kock]

Added keyword "uiwanted".

The bug reporting page urged not to use the "General" tag for Component,
so I chose "Help".  But in fact the bug concerns rather design and functioning
of the program than documentation content.  I hope  a more knowledgeable
person will reclassify as appropriate.

Cheers,
Joachim.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Feel free to report that bug to Apple, but as you'll notice if you open the Finder, type "new" and then click on the "New Finder Window" item in the Help menu, what we're doing is what your operating system says should happen.

Comment 3

[Joachim Kock]

> what we're doing is what your operating system says should happen.

Do you think it is the correct behaviour?
Or is such a question irrelevant?

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Indeed, irrelevant.