483759 - stock/tango icons for folder pane

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009030422 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.7 Ubiquity/0.1.5
Build Identifier: 

Thunderbird don't currently pick up the folder icons from the system, making them looking out of place. As for the other icons, we should use tango styled icons.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: modified folder pane css

Comment 2

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: additional icons for the folder pane

Comment 3

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

we need to figure out how we're going to deal with the (new) indications.

Just to clarify upfront, Thunderbird keeps track of "new mail" which is different than "unread mail"; which it also keeps track of.  Unread mail is the (often) bold count of messages inside a folder which are not marked read.  New messages are ones that have arrived in a folder during the Thunderbird session.

Thunderbird uses alternate folder/mailbox/account icons with a (*) orange flash to indicate new messages.  

If we're going to use stock folder icons we need a strategy for marking those folders as new.

Comment 4

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: updated css

realized "treechildren::-moz-tree-line" needs to be set to "visibility: hidden;" in order to look good.

Comment 5

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: updated folder pane

Realized we can call the icon as a background image and then use list-style-image as an emblem on top as the new indicator. As far as I can tell, there are no regressions of this approach, but I need to test it out some more.

Comment 6

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: blank image emblem, to put in icons

Comment 7

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: "new" emblem, to put in icons

Comment 8

[Michael Monreal [:micmon]]

This makes the icon "move" in some conditions (focussed selection). I was able to work around this with

background-position: center center;
background-repeat: no-repeat;

for every note type (inbox, sent, drafts, ...). Maybe there's a better way to do this?

Comment 9

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

there is a folder-unsent icon in here that I'm not sure what to do with.  seems like it was a mixup with folder-outbox... not sure.  I'll have the patch ready in a bit.

Comment 10

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

Attachment: wip for the folder pane

here's the WIP that I have right now.

one thing that I see that's left to do is decide about the secure mail account icon.  I don't really see the point in differentiating the secure mail accounts from the non-secure ones w/ icons.  That only really makes sense to me if I had two copies of the same account, one secure and one insecure; but then the point of security would seem to be lost.  Perhaps there's just something I'm missing.

also I think we could use some height spacing between the rows.

I'll put up a screenshot of what it looks like right now so we can have something to look at.

Comment 11

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

Attachment: screenshot of patched folder tree

Comment 12

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

At least in theory, the secure account icon should answer the question "do I want to touch this account in a way that will send my password over the wire while I'm here at (Starbucks|CanSecWest)?"

Comment 13

[David Ascher (:davida)]

I don't believe the % of people who would understand the implications of the difference makes sense, especially given the high likelihood that decisions about password sending are done at "remember this password" time.  

To increase security, it feels like making "remember this password" on insecure accounts req

Comment 14

[David Ascher (:davida)]

sigh.

To increase security, it feels like making "remember this password" on insecure
accounts require more conscious understanding of the issues might make sense.  A different icon doesn't, to me.

Comment 15

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

My steps for going from a "safe" connection to an unsafe one would be "uncheck the boxes for check automatically and check at startup, hibernate, walk" though for people who don't automatically check for new, it would be "hibernate, walk." Would yours be "prefs, forget password, shutdown the program so the currently cached password is forgotten, walk, restart the program, cancel password prompt, repeat"?

Do you also have an alternate method for reminding me to check every few weeks on whether my remaining insecure server has become sensible enough to have a secure way to connect, which is primary effect the icons have for me?

Comment 16

[David Ascher (:davida)]

I'm not sure I understand your first question.

My only point is that I think simply having a different icon doesn't actually provide enough information to 99.99% of users to result in actually safer behavior.  It might work for some like you with deep understanding of the security risks involved, but I think it's unrealistic to think that just an icon increases our effective security.  So if it takes Bryan & Andreas any time at all to deal with this, my advice would be that the time would be better spent working on other areas, in terms of teaching security implications.

If there is somewhere that I haven't seen some UI that explains the meaning of these icons at account creation time, then my point is somewhat negated.  I am operating on the assumption (because I haven't noticed UI like that) that the icon is the only indication of the difference in account types).

I think I'm getting an idea of your question about my point about account types & passwords -- I don't know what the right UX should be.  I would actually want to explore a lot richer UI for explaining MITM, identifying network hops between TB and the server, etc., but I think that's a lot harder, and definitely out of scope for this bug.

Comment 17

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

So what is the point of *not* having different icons? Other than the relatively small work to put a secure indicator on a couple of icons.

Comment 18

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

The point wasn't a size of work required to make it happen, be it small or large.  I already spent my evening making the patch and am working on others now.  I tried to fix each piece and understood what it was doing and this piece didn't make sense, so I didn't fix it.

Comment 19

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Magnus: it's doable, but as Bryan and David pointed out, the too tiny icons feels a bit too close to a secret handshake language.

Bryan: in your screenshot, I see a news.mozilla.org. Is that a newsgroup or a chat server? Will look into creating updated icons for those.

Comment 20

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Probably doesn't matter much for one or two accounts, but there are people who have 10s of accounts, and then it may be a useful reminder when to connect.

news.mozilla.org is a news server. (Yeah, the current icons look a bit like a chat!)

Comment 21

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

Attachment: updated WIP, this uses the account for every account type

this just updates the secure server account icons to to use the normal account icons.  I think this is ready for review.  We could open new bugs about a secure account icon and a newsgroup icon.

Comment 22

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

Attachment: [checked in] folder pane update

here's a final version

we're using folder icons as the background now with a blank/new icon for the list-style-image which meant I had to do some attrs of background-position in order to use this single image file that we've changed over to from the individual images.

thanks for looking at this!

Comment 23

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 372161 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] folder pane update

Nice! r=mkmelin

I notice message threading don't get connectors anymore. Haven't been good (properly connected) since before tb2 anyway so I'm fine with that.


> .folderSummary-previewText {
>-  color: grey; 
>+  color: GrayText; 

Tiny nit: trailing space ^^^

The "new" indicator on top of the inbox does look a bit messy. Will post a small screen shot.

Comment 24

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Attachment: screenshot - "new mail"

May depend on OS theme, I suppose...

Comment 25

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 372161 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] folder pane update

Checked in with the nit fixed, and using more specific .tab-icon-image selectors
changeset:   2377:a79528b03c85
http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/a79528b03c85

Comment 26

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

We could try looking at the new mail icon in the bottom right hand side so it wouldn't cover the inbox icon.  I opened bug 489377 for that