What’s New in Thunderbird 78 • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#61

Post by bawolff » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

tarasmatsyk wrote: post #55

It looks nice, however it feels like I am running one more browser, am I wrong here? I really like Thunderbird and that one of options for mail clients if I am on linux, however another electron app is a no-go for me.

Good luck running a mail client - you know, a program that takes html documents and renders them, because modern email is html - without running a browser.

In any case, thunderbird essentialy has a lineage going back all the way to netscape navigator (at least spiritually), so it was doing this way before electron was cool.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#62

Post by tokamak-teapot » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

jsilence wrote: post #50

I really wish TB would store mails in Maildir by default and operate on that storage according to the standard so that the local mailstore becomes compatible with other mail clients. Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.

Maildir only suggests the safe delivery mechanism that gets around lack of atomicity guarantees in filesystems by using the guarantee that a rename is atomic as a workaround.

It suggests a way to add metadata about messages through the use of flags added to file names, but doesn’t specify what these must be.

I don’t think, therefore, that Maildir as a standard provides enough to allow it to be relied upon for portability between clients (MUAs). That’s not to say a standard couldn’t emerge if there were some agreements.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#63

Post by galacticdessert » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

Love Thunderbird, and super glad to see that its development pace is picking up again.

The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#64

Post by dtech » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:25 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #32

waynesonfire wrote: post #26

thanks for the integrated openpgp support. finally.

Was enigmail being a plugin a showstopper before? Just curious of this perspective.

Don't underestimate the power of defaults and core functionality.

If gmail support PGP, you could start to really use it, since you could be reasonably confident the recipient could read the message even if they have no idea what PGP was. For a plugin they would have to actively look for it.

Unfortunately Thunderbird user base is tiny but it's something

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#65

Post by pmontra » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:36 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #16

LeoPanthera wrote: post #12

Many of these UI changes seem like backward steps. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-compariso... Old: Clear that you can enter multiple "To" addresses. Obvious that the formatting buttons are buttons. New: Single-line "to" implies you can only enter one address. "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png Extra white space makes the window nea…

Not a fan of the flat buttons but I strongly disagree about the single/multi line TO situation. I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least. All of them will be comfortable with multiple users in a single To line, while having multiple lines for multiple users will actually appear alie…

> Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.

This almost equals to assuming that nobody is older than 25 or 30 especially because the no "single person" assumption. I started with UNIX's mail in a terminal, used a dozen of different clients on UNIX, Windows, Linux, Android, not all of them graphical.

I've been using Thunderbird probably since its very first day. My other client is K9 on Android. I think the address pills will be OK but I want to test their manipulation with keyboard and touchpad.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#66

Post by Boulth6 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:39 AM UTC

aneutron wrote: post #45

I skimmed through the features and was very excited for the dark mode announcement. But that quickly went down the drain when I couldn't find how to force it from the setting, because I'm using i3wm, and there's no "dark mode" per se. The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Great work Tea…

> The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1]

Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#67

Post by jabl » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:47 AM UTC

AnonHP wrote: post #46

kbumsik wrote: post #28

Out of curiosity, what UI toolkit does Thunderbird use? GTK or the UI system derived from Firefox?

It used to be XUL, but since that was deprecated and Firefox doesn’t support it, for a while Thunderbird was still using it with a plan to switch out. The larger plan for Thunderbird is to use “web technologies” (meaning HTML, CSS and JS). IIRC, this move is already in progress.

TB has much less manpower than Firefox, so they're mostly following whatever Firefox does.

Firefox is indeed in the process of getting rid of XUL in favour of web technologies, but AFAIK it's not done yet.

And yes, on UNIX platforms the "XUL backend" is gtk.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#68

Post by trissylegs » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 6:51 AM UTC

tarasmatsyk wrote: post #55

It looks nice, however it feels like I am running one more browser, am I wrong here? I really like Thunderbird and that one of options for mail clients if I am on linux, however another electron app is a no-go for me.

All of them use some sort of Webbrowser underneath. Thunderbird is using Firefox/Gecko, Geary is using GTKWebkit, macOS Mail is probably using Webkit. Note sure what Windows Mail is using. (Similar to outlook in my experice)

Outlook... is using Microsoft Word. (I mean technical it's just Offices' document rendering engine, but for meail it's equivalent as opening a HTML file in MS Word) (Also sends RTF mail for addresses on the same Exchange server)

Although I'd note that they strip down the HTML avialible. Emails can't execute Javascript. CSS is stripped down and must be in file. (Or completely inlined)

You limited to some very old Web technology in email. (Unless Google somehow managed to convince anyone else to support AMP 4 Email)

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#69

Post by dugite-code » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:21 AM UTC

greggman3 wrote: post #34

To each their own but I find it hard to fathom using a non-cloud based email system. I regularly access my email from 7 computers.

I have a web based email app for incidental access but for any "real work" gets done through Thunderbird

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#70

Post by rcarmo » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:26 AM UTC

Thank goodness, they’ve cleaned up the to: fields in the compose window at long last. I have been using Thunderbird on and off for a _long_ time, and the lack of UI polish in thins like that has been a constant eyesore.

Too bad that the formatting toolbar seems to have become visually “heavier”, with bolder lines in some icons. I’ll just have to see what the final product looks like on both my Mac and Elementary...