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Thunderbird in 2019

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#51

Post by monksy »

RealDinosaur wrote: post #43
monksy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hence the spin-off app. A ground-up, UX focused app which does not have to meet feature parity, would attract users who are already confused by email clients. This is a different target audience to the people who typically use Thunderbird at this time. For some people Apple Mail is enough.

Those people are targeted by Geary.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#52

Post by Boulth »

kuon wrote: post #38

I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...) Things I'd like to see improved: - Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). - Native PGP. - Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fu…

Native PGP is something I'd be very happy to see. Enigmail is needlessly complex with long setup wizards that frequently fail and a lot of legacy code supported for old distros. Services such as ProtonMail show that focusing on modern conventions and picking the right defaults can really bring encryption to normal users.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#53

Post by jcranmer »

sciurus wrote: post #44
zmix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird is an XML+CSS+Javascript app. Just like Electron (well, Electron is not XML).

Looking at the languages used in Thunderbird source ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tree_Rules/comm-central#Thunderbird ): $ cloc build/ ldap/ editor/ mailnews/ mail/ 3938 text files. 3848 unique files. 949 files ignored. github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.80 T=6.01 s (497.6 files/s, 127309.9 lines/s) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code ------…

You forgot db/mork, which is another ~100K-ish LOC (at least as measured by wc -l).

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#54

Post by jcranmer »

kuon wrote: post #38

I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...) Things I'd like to see improved: - Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). - Native PGP. - Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fu…

> - Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders.

Have you tried migrating to using maildir instead of mbox?

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#55

Post by polskibus »

I wonder if Mozilla evaluates hiring teams in areas with lower avg income but still reasonable quality of CS education like Eastern Europe, Russia, etc. to get faster product development for the same donations.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#56

Post by Fnoord »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #50
graeme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost everything and it was totally gone? Or did you have a backup and restored?

Well I had a backup of sorts, domestic environment, but did lose data (yes I shouldn't have trusted it). Still haven't managed to debug so can't use Thunderbird properly yet; changing app is a major upheaval after a decade or more [not quite continuous use, tried Kmail, Opera, and a few others like Sylpheed, Mutt(!), in the interim -- after Pine, proprietary apps TB was my first desktop MUA]. So, I need to audition n…

Mailspring? [1] Its FOSS.

[1] https://getmailspring.com

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#57

Post by starik36 »

Every time I am excited to try Thunderbird I am sent packing because of all the features that are barely implemented or don't work well.

The practice of having plugins do core functionality is just not a good idea. Things that 90% of the users use should ship in the product.

For instance, cloud Exchange support is lacking. I couldn't even login to my work account, while other clients (Windows Mail, iOS, Outlook, etc...) have no issues whatsoever.

The calendar is just awful. The contacts is completely bare bones.

Here is hoping the new folks breathe some life into it.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#58

Post by mapgrep »

Boulth wrote: post #52
kuon wrote: post #38

I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...) Things I'd like to see improved: - Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). - Native PGP. - Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fu…

Native PGP is something I'd be very happy to see. Enigmail is needlessly complex with long setup wizards that frequently fail and a lot of legacy code supported for old distros. Services such as ProtonMail show that focusing on modern conventions and picking the right defaults can really bring encryption to normal users.

Full-text indexing for PGP mail would be nice too once it's native (Mailpile and CanaryMail helped pave the way on this I believe).

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#59

Post by acct1771 »

superkuh wrote: post #37
zmix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird is an XML+CSS+Javascript app. Just like Electron (well, Electron is not XML).

By that definition would you call Firefox before version ~40 a javascript app? It obviously isn't despite using XUL and the elements implicit in that. The same is true of Thunderbird.

Curious what you'd have called it.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#60

Post by jcranmer »

It's good to hear that people are interested in actually getting something set up to track performance metrics, but I won't believe it until I actually see it.

One thing I would add to performance metrics is that tests for very large folders (of about 1M) should be added. I was talking with someone last night who was complaining about how long it took to delete 200K messages from his inbox, so it's not a wholly implausible metric. I just worry that people are going to focus on metrics that go "oh, there's no issue with a 1K message folder since it's all within the 16ms budget" without looking to see their impact on 10K or 100K folders, which is where people really complain about performance.

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