537677 - Each tab needs its own message pane

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 487386

(Thunderbird :: Toolbars and Tabs, defect)

Description

[Simon Booth]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

The message pane seems to be shared between tabs, so it's not possible to use tabs to read one message while another loads.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Connect to an account with multiple folders
2. Open a long email in the first folder, and scroll half-way down
3. Open another folder in another tab
4. Open an email in the second folder
5. Switch back to the first tab
Actual Results:  
The second email is briefly displayed, then the message pane is blanked while the first email is reloaded.  The top of the first email is shown.

Expected Results:  
The first email should be shown immediately, at the same scroll position it was left at.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This is pretty much the same issue as bug 487386. However, this describes the core issue better, so I'm tempted to keep this open as the main one to implement the fix.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

I think this is wanted, not blocking, but Bryan knows the UX priorities better than I do.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bug 487386 is much wanted, so I'm surprised no one has touched this. Is it likely to be difficult? Or break addons? (or would it actually help addons?)

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Difficult. Bug 487386 has a patch that was rejected.