On large e-mail messages, message source viewer appears empty for a long time
Steps to reproduce:
- open evolution (in its e-mail view)
- select an e-mail message
- press
Ctrl+U
or click View → Message Source
Other steps to reproduce:
- follow steps as before
- switch back to evolution's main window, hiding the Message Source viewer window
- switch to some other window
- after some time, switch back to the Message Source viewer window
What happens:
Separate window opens with toolbar, but no message source. There is no indicator that evolution is working to render the e-mail message source. After some time it rendered the message source. When opening an e-mail message with about 1MB, it takes roughly 10 seconds to open it on my machine (which is quite slow, yes). Even after that, evolution's GUI freezes a few more seconds before you can scroll in the message source. At first I thought that evolution would have a bug that prevents the message source from rendering at all – until I tried with a different (smaller) message and it worked fine and the message content rendered almost immediately.
Also, in the second steps, the behavior is the same: The window content is blank for some seconds. Only after a while it is populated but then also freezes for some seconds before a user can scroll in it.
What should happen:
Workaround: If the message source cannot be displayed immediately (or within less than – for example – a second), how about displaying some loading indicator like a GtkSpinner?
In the second step: How about keeping the view instead of re-rendering it?
Additional ideas:
Instead of a workaround, would it be possible to render the e-mail content faster? As far as I understand, e-mails are just plain ASCII (or something similar) text and the source viewer shows just this. GEdit or Geany however would display it immediately. How about using GtkSourceView (as used by GEdit) instead? Or how about opening in the system's default text editor (in read-only mode?) instead? The latter would also get rid of some usability issues that e.g. Ctrl+F
does not search in the message source (as expected) but open a window to forward the message.
Installed software:
- evolution-3.42.1-1.fc35.x86_64
- evolution-data-server-3.42.1-1.fc35.x86_64
- gtk3-3.24.30-4.fc35.x86_64
- glib2-2.70.1-1.fc35.x86_64
- webkit2gtk3-2.34.1-2.fc35.x86_64
Note: This issue has also been present with evolution{,-data-server} 3.42.0-1.fc35.x86_64