605359 - Completely remove Message Pane (not just minimize it with splitter to the bottom of the Inbox)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Todd H. Poole]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100915 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.4

I was a VERY satisfied user of the Thunderbird 2.x series. Upgraded to Thunderbird 3.x and, like many others, had serious qualms with the Message Preview Pane.

My problem is this: When I go to View -> Layout and uncheck "Message Pane", the Message Pane gets minimized to the bottom of the screen. It's not completely removed, it's just minimized, still taking up space on the bottom of the screen.

To me, that didn't seem like a great solution. The whole point of disabling the Message Pane is to prevent Thunderbird from automatically reading the message, rendering its contents, and potentially executing whatever malicious stuff might be in the message. Minimizing the Message Pane doesn't necessarily reassure me that the message isn't still being read/rendered/executed somewhere off screen, it just kind of hides it out of sight.

So I did some research, and found this link: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Window_layout_-_Thunderbird

At the VERY bottom of the page, there is an instruction labeled
"Hide the message pane and its splitter"
(You can still read messages by opening them in separate windows.)

This is the precisely the kind of behavior I was looking for, and is exactly what Thunderbird 2.x had. The tip then goes on to say that in order to completely remove the Message Pane from the UI, one needs to edit their profile's userChrome.css and append the following entry:

#messagepanebox, #threadpane-splitter {visibility: collapse;}

This, however did not work for me. After appending the above entry to my userChrome.css file, and restarting Thunderbird 3.1.4, the Message Pane was indeed gone, but whenever I tried to open up a new message, the tab displayed only the header information, and not the message itself.

Changing the above entry in userChrome.css to read:

#threadpane-splitter {visibility: collapse;}

Seemed to resolve this issue.

I think it's tough to expect most people to go through and edit their userChrome.css file just to eliminate the Message Pane from their UI. Perhaps it would be a good idea to include the option to eliminate the Message Pane (and _NOT_ just minimize it) in the View -> Layout menu.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Thunderbird
2. Assuming you're running a fresh install, and that you haven't already minimized the Message Pane, the Message Pane should be up and displaying previews for messages.
3. To get rid of this Message Pane, it's logical to go to View -> Layout and untick "Message Pane"

This does not produce expected behavior.
Actual Results:  
Instead of completely eliminating the Message Pane, the Message Pane is still shown on screen, only minimized to a bar about 6 pixels high at the bottom of Inbox.

Expected Results:  
The Message Pane should disappear altogether, and should not be minimized to the bottom of the Inbox.

I think you guys are doing a fantastic job, and I hope all the hard work and progress continues. Thunderbird 2.x was, in my opinion, the best e-mail program I've ever seen or used. I'm sure there's an incredible amount of improvements under the hood between Thunderbird 2.x and Thunderbird 3.x, and that's great, but in terms of UI? Thunderbird 2.x was fantastic/hard to fault.

Giving users the option to mimic the UI present in Thunderbird 2 would go a long way to easing the transition from 2.x to 3.x. Just my two cents. Thanks, and keep up the hard work.

Comment 1

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> To me, that didn't seem like a great solution. The whole point of disabling the
> Message Pane is to prevent Thunderbird from automatically reading the message,
> rendering its contents, and potentially executing whatever malicious stuff
> might be in the message. Minimizing the Message Pane doesn't necessarily
> reassure me that the message isn't still being read/rendered/executed somewhere
> off screen, it just kind of hides it out of sight.

Once the message pane is collapsed, messages are no longer automatically loaded. The splitter is still there to make it easier to bring the pane back, but if you look at it with the DOM Inspector, you'll see that the message pane is empty.

Comment 2

[Todd H. Poole]

That's comforting to know - thanks for the update Jim.

What about removing the bar altogether though? I understand that the splitter is there to make it easier to bring the pane back should a user accidentally drag it all the way down to the bottom, but if a user has already gone through the trouble of clicking on View -> Layout and unticked "Message Pane", wouldn't it then be logical to have the thing disappear altogether since they've already inherently expressed their intent to disable it?

I can understand keeping the behavior as it is now so that if/when users accidentally drag the thing down to the bottom it doesn't pop out of existence, but the effort of going to View -> Layout and unticking "Message Pane" seems to carry with it the intent of making the bar disappear. Re-enabling the bar could be just as easy as going back and ticking the same box.

Comment 3

[Todd H. Poole]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I can understand keeping the behavior as it is now so that if/when users
> accidentally drag the thing down to the bottom it doesn't pop out of existence,

And by that I mean that it's good that the user can't drag the bar down so far that it pops out of existence. That's reasonable and logical. I'm talking about what should happen when the user goes to View -> Layout and toggles the check mark next to "Message Pane."

I couldn't tell if that came across clearly in Comment #2.

Comment 4

[Todd H. Poole]

So does anyone have any insight on this? I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and try to take a crack at submitting a patch, but I don't even know where to start looking in the codebase.

Anyone more knowledgeable than I want to comment?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

blake for hints?

(In reply to comment #4)
> I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and try to take a crack at submitting a patch, but I don't even know where to start looking in the codebase.

Comment 6

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

So, Todd, there's a work-in-progress patch up in bug 609245.  (It's the one named "A first stab at the behaviour I'ld like to see.")

I think the next step forward might be to leave a comment there, saying that you'll do the followup work in this bug, and then take that patch, and extend it with the things I mentioned in bug 609245 comment 66, and ask Jim for review and ui-review when you've got it to a place you're happy with.

(If you need help setting up your computer to build Thunderbird, please feel free to email me.)

Thanks,
Blake.

Comment 7

[André Pirard]

Since early Thunderbird releases, I've always seen a message pane in each new folder window.
There are discussions of this annoyance since 2006.
I was dragging the separation line and it did not annoy me much as I was mostly opening tabs.
Now that I'm opening more windows, I find that there should be a preference for the initial state of that pane for a new window. Hidden config would be OK but not fot the general user.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

fwiw, bug 609245 was fixed in tb10.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This doesn't happen with 115