(In reply to Josiah Bruner [:JosiahOne] (needinfo > CC) from comment #2) > This was an intentional change made across platforms that makes text fields > appear as single lines when text needs to be entered instead of the bulkier > text fields.
Imho how bulky text fields appear depends much on their borders and the overall design. Flat and borderless white against a normally lightgrey platform background isn't so bulky. Perhaps the pre-TB31 recipient area looked a bit nervous because there were so many borders all around. But I don't recall noticing any visual problems until the big redesign... It's also interesting to see the historical development of recipient area, perhaps someone could add screenshots of TB2, TB3.1, etc... TB2 is actually pretty close to the all-white background solution currently favored by Josiah. (Which is nice, but the problem starts when the formatting toolbar is added to that...) > However, it seems the general consensus is that the gray (which > originally wasn't so dark, but was changed to follow the Distro's styling) > gives the appearance of disabled fields on many linux distributions > (especially Ubuntu). Thunderbird as a desktop email application might be a more traditional/conservative thing in itself, where users (especially corporate) might care more about UX/functionality than innovative cutting edge design... But there's a more general question here how much we want to be consistent with OS platform design, vs. introducing an application-specific design... The answer is probably along the lines of what Blake said in comment 23, we need to strike a balance between being OS-conform and being ourselves as Thunderbird. Tricky... > I think we could probably clean up the linux styling. I haven't heard of any > Windows or OS X usability reports. Well, aceman and I have raised our concerns for Windows, and duplicate bug 1051638 (currently 5 votes) and bug 1061063 are both reported against Windows. Several comments on bug 1051638 are quite vocal against the current design. Even long-standing and loyal supporter like Anye Yelf who really isn't known for idiosyncratic or exaggerated criticism. Several users actually consider this a design bug and are quite surprised to hear it was intentional... Apart from the general issue, something which really disturbs me is that we're not even consistent *within* the new design. As discussed on the Toronto summit, we really shouldn't irritate users even more by having two competitive designs for the same type of control, namely Sender- dropdown vs. Recipient-type-dropdown. These are functionally exactly the same, so they should look and behave the same. I'm seeing this quite strongly on WinXP, where the dark-grey background of recipient type dropdown offsets a lot against recipient area background and I'm always wondering what's wrong with the recipient type that it still stands out from the all-flat header although it's not focused or disabled. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1347305 Title: Address fields are grey when composing messages To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/1347305/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
