541546 - Many many useless message pane context menu (click right) items

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Richard Mlynarik]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7
Build Identifier: 3.0.1 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100111 Thunderbird/3.0.1

The click-right context menu from the message pane shows many (a) utterly worthless; (b) completely inapplicable; and (c) unhelpfully grouped/ordered menu items.


For example, when clicking on a blank area (no selection, no underlying text) of a vanilla text/plain message in a mail mailbox I see a grand total of 42 (count, em, FORTY TWO) menu items, of which only a minority are of any relevance.

X 1 Open in Browser [Open what?]
X 2 Open Link in Browser [What link?]
separator
? 3 Reload [what use is this?  The message is on a local disk]
X 4 Stop [Useless]
separator [Why is "undo delete message" ground with cut/copy/paste?]
_ 5 Undo Delete Message [Not clear why this is in the menu, but ... OK.  But why grouped here?]
_ 6 Select All [OK]
X 7 [Cut [Should not be present in a read-only message reading pane.  Only text copy works.]
_ 8 [disabled, correctly] Copy
X 9 Paste [Should not be present in a read-only message reading pane]
separator [Why are worthless play/pause/mute grouped with open message in new xxx?]
X 10 Play [WTF?]
X 11 Pause [WTF?]
X 12 Mute [WTF?]
X 13 Unmute [WTF?]
_ 14 Open Message in New Window [OK]
_ 15 Open Message in New Tab [OK]
separator
_ 16 Archive [OK, except I will never use the feature and wish it weren't offered to me]
_ 17 Reply to Sender Only [OK]
X 18 Reply to Newsgroup [This isn't a usenet message!]
X 19 Reply to All [There is only one sender and one recipient, me]
X 20 Reply to List [There is only one sender and one recipient, me]
_ 21 Forward [OK]
_ 22 Forward as Attachments [OK, but what's the the plural "Attachments"?]
_ 23 Edit as New... [OK]
separator
_ 24 Copy Message Location [pretty useless for an mbox format message, but OK...]
_ 25 Move to> [OK]
_ 26 Copy to> [OK]
_ 27 Move Again [Ambiguous.  I guess this means "move to the last place you moved a message".  Should be improved.]
separator
_ 28 Tag> [OK]
_ 29 Mark> [OK]
separator
_ 30 Save As... [OK]
X 31 Print Preview [Useless; every Mac Print … dialogue supports this]
_ 32 Print...
_ 33 Delete Message
X 34 Get Selected Message [disabled; no idea what it is supposed to do in this context menu]
separator
X 35 Copy Link Location [what link?]
X 36 Copy Image Location [what image?]
X 37 Add to Address Book... [add what?]
X 38 Compose Message To [to whom?]
X 39 Copy Email Address [what address?]
separator [why are copy image/link grouped above and not below?]
X 40 Save Link As ... [what link?]
X 41 Save Image As ... [what image?]
separator
_ 42 Report Email Scam [OK, if of zero interest to me]


Wow.  Out of 42 items presented, only 20 -- less than half -- are of even marginal relevance.

And many of the sets of menu items are grouped in what seem to be completely arbitrary manner
(why have menu separators when they don't mean anything?)


Please, remove the junk!  I don't need it, any neither does anybody else.


PS How often am I supposed to "Unmute" my messages anyway?  (Make my mail reading program sing to me and I will kill you!)


PPS Yes, I did search bugzilla.  Sorry if this is a dupe.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run TB3 on a boring old mailbox (POP3 mbox format in my case)
2. View a message (text/plain; one sender, one receipient in my case)
3. Click right on a empty part of the message preview pane

Actual Results:  
Overwhelmed by random, irrelevant junk in the pop-up context menu.

Expected Results:  
Context menu with less than half the number of items.


The attached screen shot shows the same thing but with some plain text
selected first.  No matter; there would only be one (1) more relevant
context menu item in this case: "Copy".  21 of 42 items are still junk.

Comment 1

[Richard Mlynarik]

Attachment: 21 or 42 menu items are useless and should not even be presented

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

That's just "all of the possible context menu items" rather than the ones appropriate for the context where you're right clicking. 99 times out of 99, that's because of a broken extension, causing a JS error when it's supposed to be deciding whether or not to show its context menuitems, and breaking things for everyone.

Comment 3

[Richard Mlynarik]

Dear Phil,

Your diagnosis is correct.

Disabling my only non-dictionary add-on, Stylish 1.0.7 http://userstyles.org/ (I have no idea why or when I installed it in TB; though I use and appreciate it in my FF browser) has restored my menus to a correct length.

But here's the really weird thing: re-enabling the *same* add-on (no un-install re-install; no version update; just "Disable" from the "Tools / Add-ons" dialog; exit TB; restart TB; "Enable" add-on; exit TB; restart TB) I have no problem any longer!

I'd like to have been able to diagnose the presumably Stylish-related bug now you'd provided some clue of where to start, but it has evaporated, damn.

Marking this as "Resolved"; apologies in advance if that's not the correct bugzilla action.

Thanks for your time.

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Resolved is right, but not fixed, which we use to mean "we checked in a code fix" - there's an entire horde of people galloping this way right now to say "if it was an extension, that means it's invalid" but since that sounds like an overlay that didn't apply, and we don't know whether it didn't apply because of Stylish's error or because of Thunderbird's error, I'd say incomplete is closer to right.

Comment 5

[Richard Mlynarik]

Hi, this bug isn't fixed (RESOLVED) and is completely reproducible.

I was mislead by the suggestion to disable add-ons: it was the process of RESTARTING TB that superficially appeared to resolve the problem.

Since then, I've noticed EVERY SINGLE TIME I install a Thunderbird "update" (bring back TB2!) via the auto check for updates UI business, this bug manifests itself the first time the updated TB is run.

The second time TB is run the bug is no longer manifest and the correct context menu is displayed for clicking right on a message pane.

But the next time TB updates, the bug is back.

STILL PRESENT in
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10


So, to reproduce:
Have an old version of TB installed.
Acquiesce to the auto install UI's suggestion that you download a new version.
Acquiesce to the auto install UI's suggestion to restart TB.
Click right on message pane.
Result: all possible items are displayed ("Mute", "Stop", "Save Link As..." etc etc etc), not just those actually appropriate.


Somebody should mark this as unresolved and perhaps classify it as an installer bug.  (Beats me what's responsible: I just report symptoms.)

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Lum, what extensions did you have installed?

Comment 8

[Lum]

Currently I have:

Adblock Plus
British English Dictionary
Compact Menu 2
Glasser for Thunderbird
Growl/GNTP
Lightning
Provider for Google Calendar

I've had this problem for years though, before I started using Growl, Glasser or Compact Menu 2.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Can you reproduce on update with tbird in safe mode?

Take with a grain of salt, but I may have seen something similar years ago but not related to update.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Lum ?


(In reply to comment #9)
> Take with a grain of salt, but I may have seen something similar years ago
> but not related to update.

and my vague recollection now, is it was caused by an addon

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

lum, if you figure out which addon did this, please update the bug. 
thanks.