Tabbed 3-pane UI in TB
I’ve been spending some time prototyping what tabbed e-mail browsing might look like in Thunderbird. The work is going on in bug 218999 - I’ve attached a couple screen shots as well - one of a folder open in a tab, and one of a message .
Currently a tab can be either an open folder, or a stand-alone message. When you switch between folder tabs, we restore the selected folder and message. If you select a message tab, we turn the 3-pane UI into a stand-alone message window, but just by hiding the folder and thread panes 
Each tab has its own view and history context (i.e., back and forward are per-tab, as in the browser).
As capabilities are added to the 3-pane UI, they should be able to be opened in tabs. For example, you should be able to open Lightning in a tab.
Right now, I’m just using a generic tab widget. So there’s no close button on the tab (you have to use the tab context menu to close the tab), and tabs can’t be scrolled. It would be great if some xul wizard could adapt the tabbrowser.xml widget for use in TB. I tried early on, but ended up with centered tabs with no close button.
People have asked for the ability to put any mail window in a tab in the 3-pane UI - e.g., a compose window, or an address book. I think that’s a fine ultimate goal, but beyond the scope of what I’m doing now.
I’m quickly becoming addicted to these tabs - I open my “new messages” virtual folder in one tab, open an other tab for reading rss feeds, one for my bugs folder, and perhaps one for a particular message I want to go back to later. I find myself wishing the “has new” indicator would be shown on the tab if the tab is open on a folder with new messages. One nice thing about keeping the new messages virtual folder in a tab is that I can go read other folders without losing the read messages in my new messages folder, which I would if I switched away and back.
If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me know!
- David
May 26th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Interesting work. I hope that you continue prototyping. Since we do not currently use Middle-Click to open a new tab in default web browser. We can use it to open a new tab in Thunderbird can’t we? I think that in the 3-pane view, that middle clicking an email/rss item/newsgroup item should open up a tab bar in the message viewing pane of the 3-paned view.
There is a lot to be worked out here. A lot of it’s really user preference, so the implementation would have to be very customisable in my opinion.
Good work.
May 27th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
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May 27th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Would love to help and have some different ideas. What should I do? Cut paste some screen shots?