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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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101–110 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#101

Post by xeromal »

jeltz wrote: post #43
superkuh wrote: post #29

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.

Yeah, they should work on fixing bugs, improving performance, fixing search and adding some features. The UI is fine, it is the best thing of Thunderbird.

I read the article and sounds like the rewrite is mostly to do with large amounts of technical debt and being tied to firefox's development cycle. This should enable them to fix bugs if they don't have to fight code always coming from an alternative product.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#102

Post by winrid »

magnat wrote: post #98
boplicity wrote: post #50

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)?

This is a great example of the kinds of problems they're trying to tackle. This shouldn't be an issue. Just use sqlite or similar.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#103

Post by O1111OOO »

When I saw the headline, I was worried they were going to close the project. I never take community-supported projects for granted. They've been here, providing an extremely important product, for decades.

The biggest issue (from what I read) is technical debt. It's a huge, time consuming and possibly an explosive mess. They have about a dozen developers providing for the needs of millions of users worldwide. They are working on 20 years of (legacy) code.

Even Mozilla had to scrap off the old DNA in favor of new.

I am glad this core group remains excited about the project. Ecstatic that they are looking toward the future. Happy that they are taking the time to make their jobs (much) easier in the long run.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#105

Post by jrochkind1 »

Spivak wrote: post #65
jrochkind1 wrote: post #26

> The curse: coordinating efforts across a volunteer community was challenging… > …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience. Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" really never stops giving. You don't actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workf…

One entity (person/group) with a strong product vision + a giant decentralized workforce is pretty much how everything gets built. The actual people putting hands to keyboard have the mythical man month thing going for them.

The part of mythical man month I was thinking of, which I consider the most famous/useful take-away, is how adding people to a project will not necessarily make it go faster, because the more people, the more coordination work -- and Brooks paid a lot of attention to the fact that the "coordination work" isn't just, like, issuing orders and monitoring people, but involves building and sharing and maintaining "mental models", a vision for how it all goes together in a consistent and coherent way.

i don't think that vision can be developed and maintained succesfully only by people who never get their hands dirty, it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#106

Post by capitainenemo »

winrid wrote: post #102
magnat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

This is a great example of the kinds of problems they're trying to tackle. This shouldn't be an issue. Just use sqlite or similar.

At least on Linux, I think the mbox vs maildir is an interoperability thing. I can access folders created by thunderbird, or existing user local ones in any local mail client or remotely through IMAP.

It may be they don't want to break those external tools.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#107

Post by iillexial »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #34

> Why does Thunderbird look so old UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.

It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#108

Post by ulkesh »

superkuh wrote: post #29

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.

And I want a better design with better out-of-the-box, turn-key support for both Outlook/Exchange and GMail for contacts, mail (with proper conversations/threading), and calendaring. The extensions are clunky, and it always takes way too much time to get even remotely close to looking/acting correct.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#109

Post by riedel »

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…

I guess 'notable' means something like >= 0.01% in this case. But tech debt is an issue if nobody can effectively fork off anything if unhappy with the direction taken.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#110

Post by clircle »

freedude wrote: post #82

I wanted Thunderbird to be the answer to the question I have been asking for years. "How to replace Outlook in the corporate environment?" Every time I investigate it, Thunderbird is a resounding no. Why? This is not the vision of the Development Team. But if it was a side goal it would afford them the development money to do all the other things.

Whats wrong With outlook in a corporate environment?
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