Mozilla Thunderbird

Bug #810769
Comment #21

Comment 21 for bug 810769

Revision history for this message

In Mozilla Bugzilla #511079, David Gessel (dgessel) wrote on 2012-08-21:

#21

As this bug, despite originally being about improving background sending (important) has become a dumping ground for cleaning up some very annoying problems with the basic UI throwing endless barrages of modal dialogs at users in an attempt to ensure they are as unproductive as possible.

All of the modal dialogs mentioned in comment #12 need to be quashed. A Mulberry-like activity window is more than sufficient for notifications that the user can't do anything about anyway (for example any connection failure of any sort - if your mail isn't coming or going, glance at the activity monitor to find out why). A non-modal poptart window for user intervention (e.g. enter password) seems acceptable, just throw it to the background and make it modeless.

The sort of duplicate 685056 started with:

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.1
Build ID: 20110830092941

Steps to reproduce:

- Queue outgoing messages
- Start a new message
- Get to a good composition flow where thoughts are gelling and words are coming easily.
- Background send attempt times out on SMTP error [happens to me all the time, I'm often connective via VSAT or Really Crappy Connections]
- Dialog box "Send Message Error Sending of message failed. The message could not be sent because the connection to SMTP server mail.myserver.com timed out. Try again or contact your network administrator. OK" steals focus
- Lose train of thought
- Smash keyboard
- While ordering replacement keyboard off ebay, wonder why a dialog box that is merely informing the user of something completely irrelevant insisted on interrupting the user's work flow.

Actual results:

A pointless dialog box stole focus from my composition window, and interrupted my train of thought.

Expected results:

No dialog box should EVER steal focus from my work. There is no point in displaying "for your information only, there's nothing you can do, OK?" dialogs in any way that demands attention, and any such warning should come with a "never show me this annoying warning again" option.

All of the modal dialogs mentioned in comment #12 need to be quashed.  A Mulberry-like activity window is more than sufficient for notifications that the user can't do anything about anyway (for example any connection failure of any sort - if your mail isn't coming or going, glance at the activity monitor to find out why).  A non-modal poptart window for user intervention (e.g. enter password) seems acceptable, just throw it to the background and make it modeless.

The sort of duplicate 685056 started with:

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.1
Build ID: 20110830092941

Steps to reproduce:

- Queue outgoing messages
- Start a new message
- Get to a good composition flow where thoughts are gelling and words are coming easily.
- Background send attempt times out on SMTP error [happens to me all the time, I'm often connective via VSAT or Really Crappy Connections]
- Dialog box "Send Message Error  Sending of message failed. The message could not be sent because the connection to SMTP server mail.myserver.com timed out.  Try again or contact your network administrator. OK" steals focus
- Lose train of thought
- Smash keyboard
- While ordering replacement keyboard off ebay, wonder why a dialog box that is merely informing the user of something completely irrelevant insisted on interrupting the user's work flow.

Actual results:

A pointless dialog box stole focus from my composition window, and interrupted my train of thought.

Expected results:

No dialog box should EVER steal focus from my work.  There is no point in displaying "for your information only, there's nothing you can do, OK?" dialogs in any way that demands attention, and any such warning should come with a "never show me this annoying warning again" option.