Move Thunderbird’s remote content warning to the bottom
I have sort of a love-hate relationship with Thunderbird (and with Mozilla in general). Each version seems slower and less pleasant than the previous, but it is still hands down the most capable cross-platform e-mail/news client there is. I use it not only to read my e-mail, but to view and keep track of various newsgroups too.
While it could sure start a bit quicker, all in all, I’m fairly happy with it. But there’s one piece of poor user interface design in that has been bothering me lately: the remote content warning.
“To protect your integrity, Thunderbird has blocked the remote content in this message.”
I appreciate the heads-up, as well as the fact that I’m offered a convenient way to modify my image blocking settings. The problem is that this yellow bar appears with a slight delay. Whenever I open an HTML message with remote images, the body of the message appears, but is immediately relocated to make room for the yellow bar, which pushes it down with an animation. Needless to say, this is incredibly annoying.
The saving grace of Mozilla’s programs is that they’re fairly easily customized. If you add the following code to a file named userChrome.css located within the chrome directory of your user profile directory (just create it if it doesn’t exist), then the yellow bar is shown below the message body instead:
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
#msgNotificationBar {
-moz-box-ordinal-group: 2;
margin-bottom: -1px;
border-top: 1px solid rgb(145, 145, 145);
}
Now, I’ve tested this in Thunderbird 38, and I’m not sure whether it works in recent versions of Thunderbird. The development of GUI programs tends to get worse with age, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the ability to do this has been removed. Regardless, it works in the version of Thunderbird that I’ve personally settled on. I was able to figure it out thanks to the add-on DOM Inspector Plus.