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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#2

Post by autophagian »

> Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.

There's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#4

Post by s3p »

autophagian wrote: post #2

> Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface. There's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!

I'll take this over an Electron app any day :) love FF

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#5

Post by formerly_proven »

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users

Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#6

Post by jahsome »

formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's liter…

You drastically overestimate the general software consumer.

Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI.

But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#10

Post by voakbasda »

imcdona wrote: post #7

No mention of JMAP support. https://jmap.io/

If I had to guess, I would say that they mentioned it indirectly, by way of saying they need to first eliminate a fair bit of technical debt. They don't want to build new things on a crumbling foundation, so such features are too far away to announce directly.
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