658466 - RSS account doesn't use default browser and is very slow

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Eric Moore]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:5.0) Gecko/20110518 Thunderbird/3.3a4pre ID:20110518000038

I'm running Litmus test 4 (view RSS subscription article summary) in "rss account & subscriptions using Thunderbird 3.3a4pre ID:20110518000038 under Vista. It states that the thread pane should just have summaries, and that when you click on one of them it should show just the article (without comments, headers etc.) in the default browser. 

It displays the article in the message pane instead, changing the color of the summary to indicate its read. I have the message pane enabled because that is how I like to read email. I disabled the message pane and clicked on a different summary. That did literally nothing (doesn't display anything or mark it as read). 

I right clicked on the same summary and chose "Open message in new tab" from the context menu. That opened a tab that displayed the article, and changed the summary to indicate it was read.

I'm not sure what the correct behavior is supposed to be. I don't think its as simple as the Litmus test case needs to be updated to replace "viewing in the default browser" with displaying it in Thunderbird because it never created a tab/window unless I used the context menu, and most people don't enable the message pane.

I initially used http://planet.mozillamessaging.com/rss20.xml when this problem occurred. I was able to read some articles that way but many took over 3 minutes to load, and never loaded the images. I did not have any problem or delay reading that blog entry using a browser.

Reselecting that article discarded the loaded article and started to load it again. It was very annoying to wait several minutes for less than 2 dozen lines of text on a DSL connection that consistently gets about 2514 Kbps (according to both the flash and java based speed tests at www.dslreports.com). I can't find any way to display the images. I tried right clicking on the image, selecting "copy image" and then pasting that into IrfanView. That pasted the URL instead. However, there were other articles where it displayed the images. When that happened right clicking on the image and selecting "copy image" did copy the image.

In general I found the RSS reader incredibly slow. Even when it worked it could take as long to fetch one article as it took a browser to open the complete blog page (52 articles). The only case where I found the performance not an issue was with http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf , and its entire feed (of 5 articles) was about 30 lines of text and no images. 



 

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

If you select one of the items in the RSS feed, then go to View -> Message Body As, what options are selected there?

Comment 2

[Eric Moore]

That command only exists for mail accounts on my system.

View -> Feed Message Body As has Original HTML, Simple HTML, Plain Text, Web Page, Summary and Default Format. There is a line between Plain Text and Web Page and both Original HTML and Summary are selected.

I also notice a Message -> Open Feed Message which has Web Page in New Window, Summary in New Window and Toggle web page and summary in message pane. Web Page in New Window is selected.

If I right click on a summary in the RSS feed I notice the context menu has email specific commands such as Reply to Sender Only , Reply to All and Reply to List which don't make sense to me since there is no email address associated with either the "Blogs and News feeds" account, the RSS feed or the article that I'm aware of. I am also confused why Message -> Edit Message as New (for a item in the RSS feed) is enabled because it opens the compose message window and From: defaults to the email address of my default mail account. I can understand using Forward on a article in a RSS feed but not that.

Comment 3

[alta88]

it is not clear what this bug is about.

with bug 596234, Tb will now incrementally load images/links so a dead link won't leave a blank messagepane.  if the pref rss.show.content-base is set to 3, a dbl click/enter on a threadpane message will load the web page in the default browser.  if message pane is showing, pref rss.message.loadWebPageOnSelect value of 1 will load the web page in the default browser on message select.

please open a new bug with any further discreet issues.