613858 - There is no "help" in the traditional sense in Thunderbird

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 253334

(Thunderbird :: Help Documentation, defect)

Description

[Frank Burleigh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101121 Firefox/4.0b8pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101116 Thunderbird/3.3a1

From both the Mail & Newsgroups window and the Address Book menu I have a help menu populated with {brand} Help, Release Notes, What's New, and Migrate.  I do not see anything like "Contents."

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
There used to be an actual help viewer.  Now TB dishes to a web page that's about "frequent problems."  Is that the design and intent?

If it is, then the premise of the FFT Help item isn't right -- we're asked to find Help Contents.  And I think I'd rename the {Brand} Help item to "Support on the Web."  But it's a shame not to have categorized, brows-able help.  I think it's ok if that's on the web somewhere, but a support, KB, etc, page isn't that.

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Problems are;
(1) Tb also changed "Help" from embed Help document to a Web site, as Fx did.
(2) However, Web site shown by "Help" menu of current Tb is far different from Web pages accessible via Help menue of Fx.
(3) And, Web site shown by "Help" menu of current Tb is far different from embed Help document of Netscape, Mozilla, Mozilla App Suite, and is far different from embed Help document which was inherited from Netscape/Mozilla/Mozilla App Suite by SeaMonkey.

Because the change from "embed Help document of Netscape/Mozilla/Mozilla App Suite" to current Tb's Help was done intentionally by someone, it's apparently "design and intent" by/of Tb team.

Currently available user's workaround for useful Help document is:
  Install SeaMonkey, and use "Help" menu of SeaMonkey.
Even though UI related explanation is different from Tb's UI, and even though Tb only features are not explained by SeaMonkey's embed Help document, SeaMonkey's embed Help document is still far better for helpers of QA people like me, for explaination about behaviour of mailer of Mozilla family to troubled Tb users.

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

Yes, though SeaMonkey's help content needs a few updates as well to be up to date, it's much more detailed and context-specific ([F1] key) compared to the generic online help and would be a good base. This actually has been a request for a quite a while already, thus duping against the respective bug.