600305 - Two buttons labeled Forward is confusing

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Bill Barnert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100915 Thunderbird/3.1.4

There are two buttons labeled "Forward" on either side of the "Back" button. Sure, if I stop to think about it, I can determine that the one to the left means "Forward this Mail", and the one to the right means "Go Forward". But I find I HAVE to think about it every time. I go to forward the mail, and have to stop & think. I can;t even remember how this looked previously, but I know I never had this constant confusion.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a mail.
2. Look up at Mail Toolbar.

Comment 1

[Bill Barnert]

Attachment: Two Forward Buttons

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Created attachment 479132 [details]
> Two Forward Buttons

You know that you can customize the toolbar right ?

Comment 3

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

We could rename the labels to "Go Forward" and "Go Back" instead.

Comment 4

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> We could rename the labels to "Go Forward" and "Go Back" instead.

Sounds like a good idea.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul] from comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > We could rename the labels to "Go Forward" and "Go Back" instead.

With the disadvantage that longer button captions will make both buttons larger without substantial benefit, and if other localizations decide to imitate (en-)us, it will be worse. E.g. for German, "Go forward" would be "Vorwärts gehen", which is almost twice the length of just "Vorwärts".

The scenario of screenshot 1 (attachment 479132 [details]) with the two different types of "Forward" buttons next to each other on the same toolbar does no longer occur for default installations, because the Forward(-Message) button has been moved to the message header pane since TB3. And the (Go-)Forward button is only available via toolbar customization. So for default installations, the combination of both types will a) not usually occur and b) if it occurs, the two button types will be at a distance (mail toolbar vs. message header pane). That distance, together with clearly distinct icons, imo reduces the risk of confusion to very little. Green arrows really have an established unique meaning which is clearly distinct from forwarding messages.

Otoh, users who decide to add the (Go-)Forward or (Go-)Back button to their toolbar will certainly not appreciate if it permanently takes more space than necessary.

So imho, cost-benefit tradeoff in this case is no longer good enough.
I recommend wontfix for this bug.