This relates to Mail/News and to the Editor - so I have posted
this to both Newsgroups. I am posting from Netscape since I can't
get Mozilla to access any newsgroups at news.mozilla.org.
Mozilla (2001030308) under Windows 2000 (with SP1), Celeron 500,
256 M RAM. Using IMAP to a UW IMAP server on a Linux machine on
the LAN.
I spent a week solid in November trying to characterise, find and
fix bugs to do with whitespace in Composer. Three months later,
the bugs are still there and I cannot spend this sort of time again.
See my postings to the Composer newsgroup in late November, and
one of the bugs I reported:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61228
(A note there is that these will be fixed in 0.9.)
For more details:
http://gair.firstpr.com.au/public-files/mozilla-bugs/
I downloaded the latest nightly of Mozilla - primarily because
I wanted to escape a bug which others might consider minor in
N4.76 under Win2k: American month/day/year dates on the bottom
of email print outs. I use this to sort lots of emails, and it
threatens my sanity to have this rotten date format mixed up
with the right stuff.
I am not optimistic about Mozilla at present. I hear the browser
is great, but I need a solid email program to work with IMAP
over my LAN.
Here are my experiences in the first hours of trying to use Mozilla.
No doubt some are recognised bugs.
Even if you don't chase every thign I report - consider how
frustrating it is to have this many problems in the first few
hours of operation. I am not trying to do anything fancy.
I assume the extreme slowness is due to compiled in debugging code.
Messenger:
There is no way of Shift clicking to select multiple emails.
This makes certain important operations virtually *impossible*:
for instance sorting based on the name of the sender, and then
selecting all the emails of one sender, and then copying or
moving them to another mailbox.
The Message > Move or Message > Copy no longer (compared to
Netscape) has the ability to use keys (0-9, a-z) to quickly
select the destination folder and mailbox. This compounds the
previous problem by making email moving a stressful RSI
generating operation with the pointing device.
(I have had some problems sorting mail too - but have not
characterised them enough to report - it basically works, but
not always, as it generally did with N4.76.)
The sorting of the folders and their mailboxes in the sub-menus
of Message > Move/Copy is not alphabetical. (They are
alphabetically sorted in the top left window, which is fine.)
Printing produces shading around the headers. This is a waste
of ink and makes it harder to read. (Note: it is a major step
forward to be able to print from the email writing window!)
No sign of activity during Compact Folder - there is no
moving bar or hour-glass cursor - so it is easy to think that
nothing is happening. So the user might do it again!
Fortunately I can see my ethernet switch blinking and my
IMAP server's hard drive LED coming on.
The Sent mail folder *sometimes* displays the lines not as they
were sent (wrapped, say, to 72 characters) but spread out to
whatever the window width is. This is misleading and unhelpful!
One message even displayed proper line lengths (as was on
screen when writing it, as was in the file in the sent folder)
for one part of a paragraph and then switched to very long lines
(the window width) for the rest - despite those lines being
identically limited to <=72 in the file. Likewise, this
appeared in the Inbox - but the source shows all the lines
have similar lengths. What is going on?
Maybe this is related to a field in the Content-Type header:
"format=flowed". Mozilla sends with this set. Whatever
it is, I don't want it! Text is text. The whole idea of
an email editor and reader is to compose text and view and
print it without any automatic smarty-pants "features"
mangling it.
Furthermore, *sometimes* it does not show comments as "> " or ">
> " but as one or two vertical lines spanning the lines
commented in this way. These lines are on screen and printed.
This is pointless and obscures what has been written. There is
nothing at all wrong with a direct representation of text.
Likewise, the default to mangle plain text to show smilies and
maybe other graphic versions of emoticons is a disruption
and misrepresentation of what people write.
What is needed is clarity and directness. If the behaviour of
the program is not direct and simple, there must be a damn-good
reason. Such compulsory "prettying up" of plain text is at odds
with the requirement for un-mangled communication. This is the
sort of complicating featuritis we expect of a company whose
name I will not mention because you already know it! Why spend
effort on such features while the email editor is full of bugs
and Composer is, in my view, still unusable due to its constant
insertion of unwanted whitespace?
For the same reason, email should default to plain text only.
Let people send HTML if they consciously choose it, but there
are so many reasons why HTML creates more complications than
any occasional benefits it brings, that it should be kept as
an opt-in feature, not a standard mode of operation. Perhaps
that is what is now implemented in Mozilla - I don't understand
the new preferences. It used to default to sending HTML, but
now there is no option for selecting sending as text.
(BTW, as I think is already in a bug, we should be able to
read plain/HTML emails as plain text - or force purely HTML
emails into text. Viewing HTML emails can lead to loading
images from other sites, which gives away information about
where and when the email was read.)
"Edit message as new" from the Sent folder automatically adds
a Bcc line even if there is already a Bcc line in the message.
How do you set the height of the horizontal separator bar?
Each time I double click on a mailbox, it opens with some
default setting, not the way I adjust them.
When looking at, for instance, InBox, I double-click "Sent" to
open that as a separate window. But very often I get two
windows of Sent. The workaround is to change one back to
"Inbox" by single-clicking "Inbox".
This seems to happen consistently - even with fast double-
clicks.
It would be nice if the mailboxes opened to the last received
message - this would save having to grab the scroll bars and
take them to the bottom. (The scroll wheel on the trackball
or mouse is a marvel, but many mailboxes have hundreds or
thousands of messages.)
News/mail editor (plain text mode):
No spell check. I want to check the spelling after I have
written most of the piece. Then go back and write some more -
and then do a final check before sending. Currently there is
a "spellcheck before send" option - but no manual way of
checking an email being written.
When deleting text at end of para, the cursor may go to
beginning of file.
Selecting text with Control Shift End to the end of the file
does not move the cursor to the end of the file. This is
a specific instance of the cursor going to the start or end
with Control Home or Control End and being outside the
range of lines visible in the window. Ordinarily, an editor
would make the window chase the cursor position.
Sometimes, in certain areas of text, the cursor is displayed one
character to the right of where it actually is - yet earlier in
the same paragraph it is fine.
Extra spaces seem to be added when the text is reformed.
"Edit message as new" can add blank lines where there were none.
When typing, or editing, the mail editor can break lines on
screen so that the next line starts with one or more spaces.
I got into a situation where I had:
> blah
.......
but a backspace to the left of the dots, or a delete to the
right of the "h" would *not* do what I wanted: get rid of the
newline. This, I am begining to feel, is a typical Mozilla
gotcha. Something perfectly simple which is taken for
granted in editors for the last 20 or more years, and suddenly
sometimes, it is broken.
Sometimes:
The newlines which are entered automatically when typing do not
automatically reflow as the user adds and deletes words. They
should. They should be "soft" carriage returns. They should
be treated very differently from manually entered carriage
returns. Ideally, they should stay this way when the email
is saved, but because of the desire to save in a way which is
"plain text" for other things to read, it seems that such saves
as with Netscape Navigator, are destructive and turn the soft
CRs to normal CRs.
The need for soft CRs is one aspect of a proper, simple, plain text
editor which cannot be generalised from an HTML editor. Writing a
proper plain text editor from scratch is almost certainly easier
than trying to adapt a highly complex HTML editor. But knowing
a little about the internal plumbing of the Lizard's gizzards,
I wouldn't like to try interfacing a plain text editor with the
rest of the beast!
A proper plain text editor could also have manually movable margins
for wrapping text (inserting and removing soft CRs) and it could be
made to do this for selected text, or if no text was selected, then
from the current cursor position to the end of the current
paragraph. Wordstar and Pegasus Mail did this - they gave the
user direct, simple, control of what they needed to do.
So why, with our Gigahertz CPUs and megabytes of RAM do we not
have a plain text editor which actually does the ordinary things
people need? Worstar on an 8080 was better - and that was 21
years ago, running fine in 64 k of RAM.
Composer
Looking at the editor newsgroup and the source, at least for:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/editor/base/nsHTMLEditRules.cpp
It does not seem that any changes have been made to correct
the whitespace problems I reported in November 2000:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61228
http://gair.firstpr.com.au/public-files/mozilla-bugs/
I can't change anything in the first file I try to edit!
http://gair.firstpr.com.au/public-files/mozilla-bugs/mb-comp-space-
2.html
The cursor cannot be placed anywhere. I can select text, but
not delete or affect it.
I can edit other pages, and create fresh HTML, but the above
page cannot be edited!
File Close doesn't work either - Though closing the window
works. The file there: mb-comp-space-1.html is the same.
But I can edit: mb-comp-space-3.html But Mozilla crashes
somewhere amongst all this.
mb-comp-space-3.html can be edited, and the whitespace
problems it demonstrates are still there.
Bookmarks
I had some trouble loading in my 3000 bookmarks from N4.76.
I eventually solved it by editing the files manually and
deleting a pesky directory of "bookmarks" in the MSIE
favourites directory - each bookmark was a file and
Mozilla was taking a very long time reading them all and
figuring out what to do with them. There were some bugs
here which I did not characterise - but they involved
Mozilla chewing memory without limit, going from 22 megs
to 75 megs if left long enough. This was all to do with
"Edit Bookmarks" although I did at earlier times (when
the IE favourites directory was being crunched) have the
window freeze when I simply tried to pull down the
bookmarks window.
Curiously, it had no trouble at all loading a 1000
bookmark test file - there were only three unique
bookmarks in it - all repeated in a sequence of tens
and hundreds of bookmarks. Mozilla showed only the
three, but is saved all 1000 in the bookmark file.
For reasons I can't fully understand and which I don't
feel like trying to reproduce, it took me three hours
of intense trying (trying to import first) to get
my bookmarks recognised and stored by Mozilla.
This is not me trying to find problems - I am just trying to send emails
and get bookmarks and mail filtering going. Any other user would have
similar troubles - but instead of documenting them, even cursorily like
this, they would probably use another browser.
I am really looking forward to a solid, functional Mozilla!!!!! One
with clear, straight functionality - not decorative gimmicks which get
in the way of communication.
- Robin
// Robin Whittle http://www.firstpr.com.au
// Melbourne, Australia http://fondlyandfirmly.com
