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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

91–100 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#92

Uhg. This is the exact opposite of what direction I want from Thunderbird. I want it to remain stable. I want it to remain looking like an email client I run on my native OS. I do not want giant white-space webshit design and an entire rebuild that makes all my extensions and well trained spam detection .dat unusable. Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.

I believe you missed the part where the codebase has become impossible to work on. This isn't change "for change's sake", it's "because if we don't, this product is dead".

Thunderbird is absolutely due for a UX and feature set overhaul. But please please please don't follow current design trends: Thunderbird users are not and will probably never be people who appreciate the "everything is a mobile app" fad of the last few years. The term "webshit" absolutely feels apt here, and I would gladly triple my donation for the coming year if it meant that they committed to maintaining a traditional desktop look and feel in the rewrite.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#93

> “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…

A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere that this speed difference is due to antivirus.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#94
post #4

> 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

Reading the article, I was expecting the dreaded “and we’re rebuilding it on Electron” (because apparently that’s the only way anyone knows to build a desktop app nowadays), but apparently they don’t plan to move to an entirely different technical base, just to rewrite stuff.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#96

Apple Mail on OSX 10.4 (originally NeXT) working well today fyi the industrial strength, bullet proof, complex but profoundly reliable engineering within Apple Mail shows itself to have stability over decades. Why is this Thunderbird rewrite going to succeed ? A glossy sales pitch makes it less convincing, not more. This is a years' long project with no guranteed outcomes.. in fact, I would suspect that noveau securi…

I think Apple Mail was unusable around that time for me. I think it mangled attachments to/from Windows, font sizing was off (i forget if it was previews or when writing). Search didn't work.

Yeah, old versions of Apple Mail used some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues around attachments. I use the modern version, but NextMail was a different thing and legacy bits hung around for a while.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#97
post #44

email "protocol" is clunky and old AF. no need to build an email client for the 21st century when everything underneath it a donkey pulling a cart full of rotten fish. stmp/pop/imap and all the dkip.. is pure crap. we need to overhaul the entire email/messaging delivery system. not just the face of it.

There's plenty of standards bodies just awaiting new proposals — you've got your work cut out for you — thanks for volunteering!

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#98

Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.) On the m…

> For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface

Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in its own file)?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#99
What I see in this thread is A LOT of people complaining about a free product, but I wonder how many of them have actually donated money to help with the development? I just donated $100 myself because of the current donation campaign, but I'm happy with what I get largely for free.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#100
post #44

email "protocol" is clunky and old AF. no need to build an email client for the 21st century when everything underneath it a donkey pulling a cart full of rotten fish. stmp/pop/imap and all the dkip.. is pure crap. we need to overhaul the entire email/messaging delivery system. not just the face of it.

Out of scope.
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