918336 - Make timezone / location "auto" (Follow OS timezone)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1606357

(Calendar :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Mark Stetz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130814063812

Steps to reproduce:

Lighting has a location function to set the time zone (GMT offset) based on a rather long (and awkward) list of cities by continent. This is unnecessary and redundant as all OS's also have a localization GMT offset. When I travel with my laptop, that requires that I reset both my OS location (if not on auto) AND the one in Lighting. This is silly. 


Actual results:

I would expect that lighting could add an AUTOMATIC location that would simply look at the GMT offset in the OS rather than scroll through an ever-expanding location list. Really, there are only a little over two-dozen GMT offsets in the world. How hard can this be?

Comment 1

[Adhi C]

Seconded.  The Timezone tab in Calendar preferences should have a checkbox for "autodetect from system" which defaults to on, and then just allow use of the drop-down list as an override.

I'm guessing the challenge in implementing this is that there is no standard C method to retrieve user timezone information - every OS has its own prescription for accurately retrieving a user's TZ info - so I imagine this requires much one-off code and testing.

Comment 2

[Brett Zamir]

Related somewhat to this issue is Bug 1140068 for allowing events/tasks to be timezone independent.

Comment 3

[M Lopez-Ibanez]

This is also problematic when you change the system timezone and you are not aware the lightning uses a different one. When you receive an invitation in UTC, the time shown by lightning will be wrong with respect to the time shown in your computer (which presumably is your local time).

Comment 4

[Decathlon]

Also take a look too Bug 739290 comment 1

Comment 6

[Robert]

I also request the ability to set Lightning to use the system time zone. 

If I travel I want my calendar notifications to automatically update to remind me about events at the correct time, but currently I will not get event reminders at the correct time unless I manually change the Lightning time zone every time I travel. The calendar time should by default follow system time.

Comment 7

[Michael]

I support that enhancement. I travel around a lot, and already managed to miss an event because of that. All other applications (also the calendars on my mobile phone) automatically change the event time according to the system timezone. So I guess most user would expect lightning to behave like that, too.

Comment 8

[Kent Kasten]

This issue should be brought forward, escalated and resolved as its been 8 years in the making. Why do I have to create a calendar to reset an improperly set time zone in the calendar preferences that makes meeting invites show up inaccurately. Every single OS out there can provide applications the proper date/time/zone information. Time zone setting need to be pulled from the OS, with a backup of a selection list should it be needed. This setting needs to be in the main Thunderbird application not stuck in the calendar settings when the calendar feature may not be used by some users.

Comment 9

[Kent Kasten]

(In reply to Kent Kasten from comment #8)

This issue should be brought forward, escalated and resolved as its been 8 years in the making. Why do I have to create a calendar to reset an improperly set time zone in the calendar preferences that makes meeting invites show up accurately. Every single OS out there can provide applications the proper date/time/zone information. Time zone setting need to be pulled from the OS, with a backup of a selection list should it be needed. This setting needs to be in the main Thunderbird application not stuck in the calendar settings when the calendar feature may not be used by some users.