806201 - inconsistent number of clicks needed to open attachment - requesting double-click to open single attachment link on attachment bar

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Kuno Meyer]

Attachment: annotated screenshot

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20121023124120

Steps to reproduce:

When viewing messages with attachments, an inconsistent number of clicks are needed to open such an attachment:

- in the attachment main bar (">" | "1 attachment:" | "xxx.pdf 100kB" | "Save"), only one click is neeed to open the PDF file. 
- in the attachment detail view that has to be expanded manually, file opening requires a double click. A single click just means selection.

Issues:
- This behaviour is inconsistent.
- On Windows (at least), users expect to double click attachments/embedded objects to open them.
- Opening documents usually is an expensive operation (in terms of disk trashing) and usually cannot be aborted until the document has fully loaded. You shoud not start such operations with a single mouse click.

Therefore:
--> The document link in the attachment main bar should require a double click to open the document.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Kuno, I'm very much in favor of ux-consistency, but I don't see an UX problem here, much less one which deserves developer time to fix.

The single-click UX to open single attachments has been carefully crafted and provides excellent UX-efficiency. TB provides very clear and distinct UX-feedback to show in advance that single-click will open the attachment. Iow, the file link on the attachment bar looks and behaves entirely different from a normal file object which would require double-click:

UX-feedback for single-click file link:

- grey background (does not look like a file object in white box)
- inline position (and not even a file icon so far)
- blue background on hover
- tooltip on hover: "Open the attached file"
- mouse pointer changing to "hand-pointer" on hover

I don't think that leaves any doubts that the file will be opened on single-click, which is comfortable behaviour for many users.

If you prefer double-click, you can right-click on attachment bar, then choose "Initially show attachment pane" so that the attachment pane will always be open when you view a msg, allowing you easy access to single vs. double-click behaviour on the attachment file object in the pane.