505721 - Thunderbird theme on Linux feels cluttered (inappropriate spacing, etc.)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Garrett LeSage]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US) AppleWebKit/531.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/3.0.192.0 Safari/531.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3

The default Thunderbird theme on Linux feels cramped and cluttered.

Reasons:

* Padding is not adaquate in the list items
* Too much visual noise in the list (icons are complex & not always necessary)
* There are dotted tree lines (and there should not be) :..
* Zebra-striping is unnecessary (or at the very least, too in-your-face)

This applies to the message list as well as the source list (in the sidebar).

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

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

Agreed.

Andreas can you take this?

Comment 2

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Sure, already discussed them in more detail with garrett over jabber.

Comment 3

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Sure, already discussed them in more detail with garrett over jabber.

Can you summarize the discussion ?

Comment 4

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

> Can you summarize the discussion ?

Garrett had some examples of what other apps did etc. Not much else than mentioned in this bug report.

Comment 5

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: [checked in] patch to make the stars smaller

Makes the stars in front of the message smaller and less prominent when inactive.

Comment 6

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Hard to tackle this bug, as there are a lot of things in here.
* Padding is not adaquate in the list items
- will fix

* Too much visual noise in the list (icons are complex & not always necessary)
- will try to come up with a suggestion for what columns to show by default. That will fix this issue to some extent. I'm hesitant to move back to the dots though. The patch I just attached will somewhat deal with this for the stars.

* There are dotted tree lines (and there should not be) :..
- Wont fix this, as we did that, but got complains that deep threads were hard to follow without the dots.

* Zebra-striping is unnecessary (or at the very least, too in-your-face)
- Will fix this by either trying to make the stripes less prominent (with moz-opacity maybe?) or see if it works without them (and this article says it does http://www.alistapart.com/articles/zebrastripingdoesithelp/).

Comment 7

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: screenshot of smaller and less prominent stars

Comment 8

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

Comment on attachment 396440 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] patch to make the stars smaller

looks good to me

Comment 9

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 396440 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] patch to make the stars smaller

Looks good to me! Though with this, the junk icon sure looks large in comparison, so maybe that too needs an adjustment.

Comment 10

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

adding checkin-needed so this gets in before b4 but lets keep this bug open to investigate the junk icon along with the other comments in comment 6

Comment 11

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 396440 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] patch to make the stars smaller

Checked in: http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/6d1f7394363d

Comment 12

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Mass move to the new theme component.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Bryan Clark [:clarkbw] from comment #10)
> adding checkin-needed so this gets in before b4 but lets keep this bug open
> to investigate the junk icon along with the other comments in comment 6

>3 years later - is there much left that hasn't been fixed?
perhaps items should have a new bug(s)?

Comment 14

[Stefan Plewako [:stef]]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #13)

I have no idea what kind of info you want from me and I don't use linux on desktop anymore.

Comment 15

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Closing this bug as the issues in comment 6 are fixed in other bugs.

If something is still remaining, please file a new bug.