Fade-in animation when opening message plays even when animations are disabled

[a3nm]

Expected behavior

When disabling the "Global settings > Display > Animation" setting, when opening a mail, no animation should play.

Actual behavior

Opening a mail results in a fade-in animation, with the message contents appearing progressively (the duration is around 0.5s-1s).

Steps to reproduce

1. Disable the setting "Global settings > Display > Animation"
2. Open a message
3. Observe a fade-in animation

Environment

K-9 Mail version: 5.200

Android version: 6.0.1

Account type (IMAP, POP3, WebDAV/Exchange): IMAP, if it matters

Other users have complained about this behavior on a mailing-list: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03953.html

Thanks for your help!

[cketti]

That's not an animation. That's the WebView component taking its sweet time to load, render and display the message contents.

[a3nm]

Thanks for your feedback! Are you sure about this? There are two things that make me think that this isn't just due to message contents being loaded:

• I can distinctly see that the message contents are "fading in", i.e., they are initially transparent and then become progressively more visible over 0.5s or so. There is no jitter or no progressive loading of the contents: when they start becoming visible, they appear to be fully loaded already.

• This behavior is new in recent versions. I couldn't pinpoint exactly which version, but this wasn't happening a few weeks/months ago.

(Alternatively, maybe there could be a reason why the WebView component would be playing animations in recent K-9 versions that it didn't use to play before?)

[cketti]

Google is updating the WebView component via the Play Store. So its behavior could change from one day to the next.

[a3nm]

Thanks again for your feedback! I'd be surprised if this was the explanation: the phone does not have Play Store, it runs Cyanogen without Google applications, and it is not configured to install updates automatically. So I think it's unlikely that the behavior of WebView is what changed.

In any case, I think it would be easier if someone else could reproduce this issue, i.e., confirm that with recent K-9 versions there is a new fade-in animation when opening a message, even when applications are disabled.

-- Antoine Amarilli

On Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 06:19:16AM -0800, cketti wrote:

Google is updating the WebView component via the Play Store. So its behavior could change from one day to the next.

[sminster]

I see this behavior too, right after my K-9 Mail was updated to this version. I hadn't noticed it before. Everything is all rendered on the message display, and then the message text fades in. Even for more complicated HTML messages, the whole things fades in at once. It's a minor thing, but it would be nice if the message body was displayed at the same time as the header information.

[Valodim]

There may indeed be something to do here. Mails are now rendered from their structure and only then displayed, rather than just showing a saved html blob. This allows us to do various things that weren't possible earlier (e.g. pgp/mime), but it's also not as fast.

I guess we could just show the webview immediately, and not only display when we get a callback that it's finished.

[staples1347]

The fade-in animation also happens every time you rotate your device while viewing the email.even with animation scale disabled in Android Developer options so there might be a default setting somewhere in the k9-mail theme. It started happening when the new 5.2 series was deployed to play store, but before that 5.0 was the version in play store so I understand a lot may have changed since then.

[voronind-com]

Still relevant. That animation makes me feel sick, sorry.

Sidebar also stays animated (open/close).