516610 - default mail toolbar looks sad and empty

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Toolbars and Tabs, enhancement)

Description

[brandt24]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090914 Shredder/3.0b4pre

Am I the only one who thinks that the default look of the Mail toolbar is not very nice looking? Could something be done to make it look like it actually has a purpose anymore? I am no UI guru, I admit, but this just does not look very harmonious to me.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Bug 506011 caused this

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

Actually, this was bug 474523, "remove reply, reply all, forward, delete,
junk, and forward/back buttons from default mail toolbar." In its wake,
bug 515715 was spun off to establish some migration UI, in order to allow upgrading TB2 > TB3 users to retain their customizations.

Obviously, any migration UI would not affect the default toolbar for new users when setting up TB3 for the first time. Thus, for this bug to be confirmable, some specific ideas to provide a better default toolbar would be needed.

Comment 3

[Minh Tran-Le]

I am using mostly IMAP and I think that the default tool bar should have: compact, tag, reply, delete, print and junk.  I don't think that there is anything wrong with having duplicate buttons and if you have multiple message selected you would have to use either the toolbar buttons or the menu bar or the accelerator keys (if it exists).

Comment 4

[Christoph Grether]

The title is a little bit unspecific, though. I agree with the request, the Gloda seach bar will automatically resize  plus Bug 515648 asks for a manual resizing feature. So I fail to see, why we removed so many buttons in bug 474523.
A few buttons and an huge searchbar really don't look very good. A minimalistic default icon set and the idea to force people to use the icons in the message reader makes the main toolbar obsolete, which is sad, since a customizable toolbar was one of the main good things in Firefox/Thunderbird. 

Also, we must think about people, which never customize their toolbar. A lot of people just use programs with default settings and there the current toolbar completely fails, because of the minimal functionality.

I'm mainly using Pop3 and think Get Mail, Write, Print, Reply, Forward, Delete, Junk, Address Book, Archive and Tag along with the searchbar should be present in the default toolbar. This is what users expect from a mail client. There is also no harm, when we have e.g. a Reply button in the message header and the main toolbar, so the user can decide, which way he prefers.

Comment 5

[brandt24]

Completely agree with Christoph here. My first reaction when I saw that was "what the...?"
Anybody perhaps wanna post some screenshots or mock-ups of what they are using/would like to have?

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I suggest you read the discussion in bug 474523 (especially Bryan's comment - bug 474523 comment 48).

IMO the change was intentional and therefore this bug is essentially invalid - especially in terms of the current suggestions of putting the same buttons back.

However I'm leaving this open for now in case Bryan wants to do additional follow up.

Comment 7

[rsx11m]

You can probably remove the "IMO" from comment #6, Bryan was rather explicit about the intentions of his change (and as can be seen, users still disagree with it). As comment #4 points out, size constraints are not a valid issue.
Even under the assumption that any attempt to bring back message-specific buttons onto the toolbar won't pass Bryan's ui-review, the current default toolbar indeed looks irritatingly minimal and suggests a lack of functionality (despite the opposite being the case).

If the intention is to not allow buttons which are only applicable to messages in the default toolbar, more general buttons applicable in message lists or other context could make the toolbar a bit more friendly again. I don't quite understand why "Tag" (which should apply to messages only and therefore should fall into the Reply/Forward category of buttons, unless it can also applied to accounts of folders now) is still in the default toolbar whereas navigational buttons (Back, Forward, Previous, Next) applicable to message lists are not. Another candidate to bring back to the toolbar may be the "Mail Views" which I've seen in a couple of screenshots as being frequently used. The "Compact" button applies to folders and would fit, also showing off the new feature.

Comment 8

[brandt24]

wow, I don't wanna know what the initial reaction will be when folks will be seeing something so "strange"? UI in TB is mess already as it is.

Comment 9

[brandt24]

good point, rsx11m, what has been cooked up right now is not gonna win people over from Outlook or WLM, but rather make them question if they have really downloaded a non-alpha version of TB. Even if the idea was to keep it sweet and short - this is not the way to go. UI is a major disaster already.

Comment 10

[Christoph Grether]

One thing we always forgot about, what happens to people, who have disabled the message preview (View --> Layout --> Message Pane)? They just can reply to messages using the right click menu? Or they must open the message, before they find buttons for reply etc.

A disabled preview was suggested by many magazines, due security reasons. My father has the preview disabled too. These people just find a naked toolbar, which really isn't ideal and suggest the lack of functionality.

Comment 11

[rsx11m]

(In reply to comment #2)
> bug 515715 was spun off to establish some migration UI, in order to allow
> upgrading TB2 > TB3 users to retain their customizations.

Fyi, the preliminary work in bug 516884 on such a UI looks promising.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

By itself, I don't see anything actionable in this bug report.  But other aspects of toolbar are being looked at post v5, so perhaps this can be rolled into one of those bug reports. I'll leave that to others. (or to just close this bug)

It should be noted however, that if one uses addons that require toolbar (eg. calendar) and/or has text beside their icons, then there is far less blank space.

Comment 13

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

We could replace the flexible spacer with a non-flexible spacer so that the global search widget would use up all the available space at least.

Comment 14

[rsx11m]

...but then you may run into issues when adding back any buttons, which would squish the search bar with a fixed-size spacer. Making it small or removing it altogether wouldn't look better either, given that the spacer introduces some structure to the right half, and a full-width search bar would look a bit odd.

Comment 15

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

(In reply to comment #14)
> ...but then you may run into issues when adding back any buttons, which
> would squish the search bar with a fixed-size spacer.

Fixed-size spacers are pretty small (15 pixels wide), so this would have very little effect on the actual width of the search box.

> and a full-width search bar would look a bit odd.

No worse than the address bar in Firefox or the search/address bar in Chrome.

Comment 16

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

With supernova we've been working towards moving actions into context (for a better UX) even further than was discussed previously in this bug. As a result, the new unified toolbar is even emptier by default. We want to invite users to use the in context actions by default while still offering the option to customize the toolbar with many buttons.