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:

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. (Contrary to what I wrote previously, the spelling checker bug didn’t actually go away when I thought it had.)

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. When it is triggered by automatic save, you are liable to think you accidentally asked to send the message, and become confused. Because it is triggered by automatic save, it gets flung in your face while you are typing, and 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.