495255 - reply/forward buttons obscure "From" address when window is narrow like in "vertical view" layout

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect, P3)

Description

[Stanis Trendelenburg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090427 Fedora/3.5-0.20.beta4.fc11 Firefox/3.5b4
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 3.0b2

In Thunderbird 3 beta 2, the new "reply/forward/..." buttons in the message pane obscure the "From" address when using the "vertical view" layout (see attached screenshots). They should probably go above or below the header fields in this case.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select "View > Layout > Vertical View"
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
See attached screenshots

Expected Results:  
The reply/forward/active/junk buttons should be above or below the header fields, but not in front of them.

Comment 1

[Stanis Trendelenburg]

Attachment: Screenshot illustrating the problem (linux platform)

Comment 2

[Stanis Trendelenburg]

Attachment: Screenshot illustrating the problem (windows platform)

Comment 3

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

This is WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090526 Shredder/3.0b3pre

Comment 4

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

that does look ugly, I'm not sure what the easiest fix would be.  We are wasting a lot of space on the left of the labels but I don't think we can reclaim that unless we rewrite the headers into a grid element.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Easily reproducible, just shrink the window to be quite narrow.

Comment 6

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

clarkbw: one possibility might be to hoist the buttons onto their own line above the From header for this layout.

Comment 7

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

It's not just "this layout" though, vertical view just makes it more likely that you'll have a narrow enough preview pane to see it.

Comment 8

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

(In reply to comment #6)
> clarkbw: one possibility might be to hoist the buttons onto their own line
> above the From header for this layout.

I thought we tried that but it ends up adding 1.5 lines to the height that looked like empty space.

What I'd really want is an HTML style float on those buttons that would cause the from header to wrap to the next line instead of being covered.

Comment 9

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Because we've won back the empty space to the left of the header names, as well as have squished the buttons together, my take on this is that it should be uncommon enough that we don't need to block on it.  Marking blocking-.

If anyone disagrees, I'd like to understand more details about when it's useful to you to have the message pane so narrow that this is a problem.  For me, having the message pane that narrow makes enough of the message bodies look bad that it's not worth it to use that way regardless of this problem.  I'd be curious if that's not true for others, what factors make it useful in those circumstances.

As far as approaches to fix this, it does occur to me that we could detect underflow on the from address, and when that happens, pull that line out of the top grid and stuff it into the bottom one, below the button box.

Comment 10

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Er, "detect overflow" is what I actually meant.

Comment 11

[Cédric F]

buttons (reply/forward/archive/junk) AND message scroll bar disappears when width too small.
The better way is, to change messages list view :
On vertical view, use 2 lines to display Subject/From/Date

Comment 12

[PaulM]

I use TB 3.0.04 on linux, on a 24" 1920x1200 monitor using enlarged fonts to save my eyes; my TB window is 1100 pixels wide, and the "from" field in mail preview (vertical layout) is badly obscured whenever the previous shows a long header like "content-transfer-encoding base64" which pushes everything to the right. It's annoying at times, sometimes I find myself having to maximise the window, other times forwarding it.

Comment 13

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Original bug is fixes by bug #520249. But on vertical view now we have another issue: toolbar header buttons overflow message preview.

I close this as fixes by bug #520249: feel free to reopen it if I'm wrong.


ps: fixed by and not dupe because when I narrow the message preview the buttons aren't on From but over cause the changes on bug #520249.

Comment 14

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Obviously fixed by bug #520249 when bug #520249 will be fixed.

Comment 15

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Resolving this based on comment 14.