Glad to see UX on that list. Under the hood Thunderbird is incredibly powerfull, but actually using it beyond the most basic workflows is mildly painful. With competition from highly polished webmail clients with autolabeling features I find it hard to actually recommend Thunderbird to anyone unless they need PGP (which is even more painful in Thunderbird, but PGP in the cloud is a different threat model).
Thunderbird in 2019
21–30 of 168 posts
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#22The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard). This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019. I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email cl…
The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd…
I don't get it, why can't anything change? In fact, the platform in which Thunderbird runs - XULRunner - is the equivalent of Electron for the Gecko engine, and a bunch of different applications have been done with it.
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#23The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard). This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019. I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email cl…
The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd…
> What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app
Now this is something you don't read everyday on Hacker News...
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#24The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard). This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019. I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email cl…
The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd…
Electron apps are usually pretty terrible.
They have issues with:
1. Memory usage and cpu usage (you're running a browser to run your application)
2. Platform look and feel (doesn't exist in javascript)
3. Platform and windowing behaviors.
I agree with the other commented to you.. if it changed to electronic, I would drop it as well.
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#25Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Google calendar? I gave up on it a couple years ago and just use the website, but I'd love to use it again if possible. I honestly can't remember what issues I had, but I do remember near the end I was using it as a view only feature, but for actually stating hangouts or creating new meetings I still had to use the website anyway.
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#26Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Google calendar? I gave up on it a couple years ago and just use the website, but I'd love to use it again if possible. I honestly can't remember what issues I had, but I do remember near the end I was using it as a view only feature, but for actually stating hangouts or creating new meetings I still had to use the website anyway.
yes, daily
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd…
I use Thunderbird because it is an application. If it became a Javascript app I and many others would surely switch to some other application.
It is a JavaScript app :) e.g. https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/file/tip/mail/base/conte...
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#28It's good to hear that Thunderbird is getting more resources. One UI bug that I didn't see mentioned in the post though, and that shouldn't exist in 2019, is that Thunderbird loses the scroll position of a tab when changing tabs. I hope this will get fixed soon.
Lol, Thunderbird seemingly has plenty of major loss-of-data bugs (I lost all my archives recently; synced up to the server -- that bug seems to be several years old (but rare)). I'd almost guarantee that your tab-scroll-position bug is fixed first. It seems to be the way of things. Thunderbird seems incredibly janky to me (unstable and easy to break, rough around the edges). Maybe my experience is rare ... would love…
You lost everything and it was totally gone? Or did you have a backup and restored?
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#29Thunderbird still has a critical bug open that literally deletes your email. I have been bitten by it once and lost hundreds of email permanently. Not fun. I am subscribed to the ticket and every month or so someone posts an outraged "me too".
Re: Thunderbird in 2019
#30I use Thunderbird pretty much just for FiltaQuilla extension, which runs shell commands when email matching some filter arrives. It would be nice to have this functionality built-in and extended (e.g. email data could be passed to stdin).
The biggest drawbacks is overall slowness (especially when syncing with server) and search UI (which really needs to be condensed). BTW it would be nice to have option to search for all mails involving some address by just right-clicking the address, like in Mailspring.