Ben Bucksch wrote:
>
> Matthew Thomas wrote:
>...
> > Well, we don't open a progress window when updating the browser
> > window (loading a Web page). So I don't think it would really make
> > sense to open a progress window when updating the three-pane window
> > (loading messages).
>
> We do open a progress window, if a binary file is downloaded.
Downloading a binary file is not updating the browser window, so that's
somewhat irrelevant.
> Since
> mail can contain large attachments, we must IMO provide a similar
> progress, at least, if there are large mails
We could add more detailed progress to the status string when a single
message was taking a long time, avoiding the impression (that my family
has suffered from when using 4.x) that the mail download had stalled.
E.g. normally we'd show
------
1 of 11 messages in Inbox, 20 seconds remaining ...
------
But if a single message had taken more than one second to load so far
(or the previous message had taken more than one second to load, making
it reasonably likely that we were on a slow connection so the current
message would too), we'd show something like this instead:
------
3 of 11 messages in Inbox, 14 kb of 25 kb in this message, 17 seconds
remaining ...
------
> (can't you check this
> beforehand with POP and IMAP?).
With IMAP you don't normally download attachments when you check for new
mail anyway.
When performing an offline synchronization we certainly should have a
standalone progress window, because offline synchronization is likely to
take quite a bit longer, and because it will not just be synchronizing
items related to the three-pane window -- it will be updating multiple
accounts, address books, subscribed Web pages, maybe even bookmarks and
preferences to an FTP server ...
> > With current new window performance
> > <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49141>, the opening and
> > closing of the window would at least double the time it takes me to
> > check for new mail if I have no messages.
>
> You don't have to open a window, if there are no messaged to download.
>...
But I would if I had one message to download, so the same problem would apply.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla user interface QA
