Case Study 5 - Mozilla Thunderbird
Part of the Open Source case study.
A Thunderbird pop-up menu that Mario jumped on:
It is meant to be empty, but even empty controls are supposed to have correct dimensions.
The following occurred after typing some letters of a name and then backspacing them out (probably due to bad typing):
Thunderbird has inherited Firefox’s problems of broken tooltips:
It has also been taking History classes with that great teacher, Windows Explorer:
Spelling checking in Thunderbird can be faulty. I have inline spelling checking disabled, which triggers it to display red underlines in the subject line. Apparently, “Thunderbird” is not in Thunderbird’s dictionary:
(Although “Thunderbirds” is the top suggestion it offers…)
The context menu for the supposedly misspelt word has no suggestions, because inline spelling checking is disabled:
If you enable and then disable inline spelling checking (Options → Spell Check As You Type) the problem appears to resolve itself once you restart Thunderbird, removing the seeming inconsistency from the settings. I only recently installed a dictionary which is why I only just discovered this problem.
The red recipient address in the first screenshot is a bug that persists, presumably some sort of check as to whether you’ve entered a valid address or not. Of course, it’s wrong frequently.
I forget whether the following was triggered by manual or automatic save during composing an e-mail; it was not triggered by a request to send the message:
It’s a confusing dialog box that is used verbatim for all of save, automatic save and send. If it is triggered by automatic save, you are liable to think you accidentally asked to send the message, get confused. Because it is triggered by automatic save, it gets flung in your face whilst typing, steals a space character and dismisses itself before you even get to read it. People never learn: displaying dialog boxes while a user is typing is absurd.