A very addictive feature of KMail under KDE makes excellent use of arrow keys in combination with the Ctrl key for navigating between messages. I don't believe the key bindings involved would disrupt anything Mozilla is now doing, and would certainly go a long way usability wise. Quick description of how KMail does this: No matter which pane a user happens to be active these key strokes perform the same task. There is no difference in the actions based on whether a message has been read or not. Up/Down Arrows and PgUp/PgDn scroll the selected message. Right and Left arrow change which message is selected. Ctrl-Up/Dn Arrow moves up and down the folder tree. Ctrl-Space selects the folder. Space pages down the selected message to the end, then jumps to the next unread message. The only weakness to this approach is for messages that are wider than the viewable area. In this case, a mouse is required to scroll horizontally. This is rather special case though as most E-Mail fits within the 72 columns, or is word wrapped to the visible width. The biggest advantage here is that the user need not be concerned with which pane is currently tabbed to. From users that I have observed this is a large point of confusion as to how both Netscape 4.7x and Mozilla operate. There simply isn't room for adequate visual indications of what tab is doing what in which pane.

You can get this effect with Optimoz, but this does sound look a good idea. Usability heuristic: efficiency and ease of use.

I use KMail too and I like keybindings. There is no need to bind left/right arrow keys to Next/Prev mail function, since Tbird uses F and B keys for it. There is a bug though: they don't work when Caps Lock is on. Inability to scroll current message if I am not in the message area is annoying. Yet another annoying buglet: when I step through messages with F and B while View->Messages->Threaded is on, even unread threads are not expanded (I see only top-most posting) and I cannot open them with keyboard. Yes, right arrow would open the thread *if* I am in the message list pane, but I'm not in that pane (because I can't scroll message area from there, see above) and hence cannot use right arrow for opening the thread. 8) Maybe it makes sense to alter F to automagically open threads if there is at least one unread mail inside? Alternatively, it makes sense to add some way to scroll message while user is any pane. In fact, I like this better. Say, Shift-arrows?

MASS-CHANGE: This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state. If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way. If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar). If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state. Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Enhancement request still valid for current builds. Re-marking NEW.

Karsten, are we planning to fix this or is it a WONTFIX?

KMail may not care, but its keybindings (or rather: those proposed in comment #0 - dunno if they're still valid) work counter-expectational even in KDE, not to talk about Windows or even Mac. ("work counter-expectational" as in "make widgets work differently from other places this widget is used in the OS.) => WONTFIX