User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Starting today, 102.5.1 (64-bit), any message I open, by double clicking or highlighting and pressing Enter ...

Actual results:

... will open scrolled about 2/3 of the way down and with maybe 3 random characters selected and highlighted with the big teardrop touch icons, with the surrounding text in a matching color box.

Yes, this ancient Surface Book used to have touch capability, but it failed and is disabled. I haven't seen those icons for a year.

Expected results:

Just open normally at the top of the message...

(I thought maybe the double click was falling through to the message opened over it, but the highlight-and-Enter method shows the same problem.)

Maybe I missed this before, I'm half-blind and miss things at the edges of the screen. But I just noticed the selected chars are search results for a search I did yesterday in a long deleted message. If I do a new Ctrl+F search in a message, close the message, and open a different one, that same search is instantly performed in the new message! If it was a common pattern, it will scroll most any new message to the matching text. Go back and close the search with the 'x' in the search bar and this stops.

I'm pretty sure this didn't happen until today... I habitually close searched messages without separately closing search first. I can imagine having a search entry persist could be useful, but only if it required a new Ctrl+F to trigger it again.

Hi Loren, as you hinted, this bug is almost a feature if it wasn't so annoyingly sticky ;-)
This relates to the way things are currently implemented in the 3-pane-view and message tabs, which will radically change with the next version of Thunderbird in mid 2023 (via bug 1729379). Currently, most message views will always show exactly the same thing UI-wise, because they are re-using the same element shown in different places (which makes your bug a duplicate of bug 487386). We won't fix this for Thunderbird 102, so your best option is to close the find bar as soon as you're done searching. Afasics, the behaviour has not changed from TB 91.

For the record, here's what happens:

• Do Find in this message (Ctrl+F) in message preview of 3-pane.
• While find bar is still open, open other messages in a tab
  => All of the other messages in a tab will show same findbar with same search active. The search highlights the first instance if found, which may cause scrolling, too (might be useful sometimes, but mostly not).

It also happens the other way round:

• Do Find in this message (Ctrl+F) in any message tab
  => Same search will be active in all other message tabs, and in the 3-pane message preview (that's pretty odd and useless).

Similarly:

• With user preference Open messages in an existing message window enabled, open a message
• In the message window, do Ctrl+F
• Open another message from 3-pane
  => same search active (that's less surprising, but also unlikely to be useful).

Thomas D. (:thomas8)
Thanks for your kind and thorough reply! And the 14 years of history... I'm dumfounded that in years of using TBird I didn't run into this behaviour until yesterday. Guess I typically search for such obscure things they don't appear in any other messages.