709489 - Selecting Links from About Mozilla Thunderbird does not bring results to foreground

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[David E. Ross]

Windows XP SP3
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0

If I select [Help > About Thunderbird] from the menubar, I get the About Mozilla Thunderbird popup.  At the bottom of that popup are three links: "Licensing Information", "End User Rights", and "Privacy Policy".  Selecting either of the first two results in a Thunderbird tab that is hidden behind the popup.  One solution might be to close the popup when a link is selected.  

By the way, "End User Rights" can too easily be interpreted as "Terminate User Rights".  The link text should instead have a hyphen: "End-User Rights".

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to David E. Ross from comment #0)
> Windows XP SP3
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0
> 
> If I select [Help > About Thunderbird] from the menubar, I get the About
> Mozilla Thunderbird popup.  At the bottom of that popup are three links:
> "Licensing Information", "End User Rights", and "Privacy Policy".  Selecting
> either of the first two results in a Thunderbird tab that is hidden behind the popup.  

"Hidden" may be too strong a term - the tab of information is clearly visible if the thunderbird window has any useful size.


> One solution might be to close the popup when a link is selected.  

"About" is modal to the current window, so closing "About" may be problematic. Not to mention, that it wouldn't follow Firefox's style...

Note, firefox opens a new window for each of these things, not just a new tab.  And it pushes the new window to foreground. So perhaps that's how it gets around the problem you see in thunderbird ?


> By the way, "End User Rights" can too easily be interpreted as "Terminate
> User Rights".  The link text should instead have a hyphen: "End-User Rights".

please file a new bug

Comment 2

[David E. Ross]

On my PC, selecting the "End User Rights" link results in a tab where the information is in a box that is COMPLETELY behind the About Mozilla Thunderbird popup.  I call that "hidden".  

Selecting the "Privacy Policy" policy link opens a Web page in my browser.  Having selected that link first, I would then expect the other links on the popup also to open Web pages.  Since they do not do so, something should be done to make it more obvious that a Thunderbird tab has been opened with the requested information.  The About Mozilla Thunderbird popup could be redesigned smaller to show more of the tabs behind it when the links are selected.  Alternatively, the popup could be recast as a Thunderbird tab that opens other tabs.  

The misleading "End User Rights" label is now reported in bug #761443.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Same thing happens in Firefox. This is because the dialog is modal.

Do we have good reason to want to change this?
If so, do we go in the direction of Bug 1364703 - Use a tab for "About Firefox"? (which has gotten zero traction)
Or Do we want to stay status quo?

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

I'd say we want to stay status quo. When FX decides to go to use a tab, we still can then open a bug.