516141 - Separate buttons for Reply and Reply-All/Reply-to-List (depending on context) in message header

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Peter Lairo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a2pre) Gecko/20090911 Namoroka/3.6a2pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Creative ZENcast v1.02.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090911 Lightning/1.0pre Shredder/3.0b4pre

Reply is probably the most common way to, well, reply. The others (reply all, reply to list) are, less common special cases (with reply-all a clear second most common).

Perhaps the best solution would be to have the 

 (o) Reply button *always* visible

and have a second button appear when there are either:

 (a) multiple recipients or
 (b) there is a "list"

and the second button's default action would adjust to the context ("all" or "list" or whatever).

                   [Reply] [Forward] [Delete]

       [Reply] [Reply All \/] [Forward] [Delete]

   [Reply] [Reply to List \/] [Forward] [Delete]

That way, the first button (left-most) is always Reply, the special-case buttons noticeably appear at the location of the Reply button, and the other (non-reply) buttons are always physically in the same location (on right and right-aligned). That way, all buttons are easily located using basic human memory. (and believe me, I rely heavily on *basic* human memory ;-) )

Also consider that the icons would take up much less space, and be far more recognizable, if they contained images, instead of text, per default (see bug 516140).

PS. Try the most-awesome https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/13564

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

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

Your proposal has some promise but I don't think we would stop the shipping of Thunderbird 3 if we didn't implement this bug.  bug 465138 is investigating customization of the header buttons (and is blocking) which could allow for configurations as well as other configurations more suited to other people.

Comment 2

[Alfred Kayser]

Currently the Reply & ReplyAll buttons in the header are dropdowns, 
the either Reply or ReplyAll is shown (depending on to/from lists I guess), and sometimes even both...

Comment 3

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Fixed by bug 511924 (and later changed by bug 519956).