846879 - Pressing F1 in Address book does not open address book specific help on the web site.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Marcos Trentacoste]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17

Steps to reproduce:

try to see the Help page of the address book


Actual results:

when I click on the menu: Help content, within address book, it takes me url of general assistance
https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/home


Expected results:

should show me a website where content has only address book

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Thunderbird does not have a build-in Help viewer (that's bug 253334), thus the Help function simply directs to the starting point of the Knowledge Base website.

As evident in SeaMonkey's, the context of when Help is requested can be determined by adding respective "helpTopic" attributes to the XUL code, and then mapped into an URL, which in Thunderbird's case would have to be an external but context-specific address to the support website. I don't know if the underlying code is specific to the suite or could be easily used for Thunderbird as well.

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

Hmm, some windows (like the Account Managers) don't react to pressing F1 at all. Another issue might be that the web content may change, and thus the entry points for the Help function. Thus, the table of contents with respective matches to the helpTopic values would have to be kept at the KB side as well.

A "lite" version of this might be to at least adjust the URLs of the main windows to match the entry points in the KB, thus to provide somewhat of a sensitivity of the context in which Help was invoked.