The Future of Thunderbird • Hacker News Board

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#111

Post by jeltz » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #101

jeltz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read it too and I am not as hopefully as you given how previous changes have mostly made the performance worse than fixed anything. Hope I am wrong though.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#112

Post by narag » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

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…

I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works OK, fast and no problems at all.

After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing.

Suggestions very welcome.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#113

Post by tannhaeuser » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

evanwang0 wrote: post #80

I hope this will spawn an Electron alternative. Would be nice to see a break from Chrome monoculture.

I guess it's entirely on the table Thunderbird is, in fact, becoming an Electron app. Thunderbird the project has no ties financially to Mozilla anymore AIU, they're merely using gecko as embedded browser. From the comments in this thread, I get that Thunderbird is technically a hold-out from the XUL times, or even a large old-Firefox plugin of sorts more so than a standalone app. With Moz themselves having abandoned their platform over ten years ago, why would the Thunderbird team venture into creating an Electron-workalike based on Firefox when even Moz don't do so? Doesn't sound like something you'd want your mail client team to do considering initial and ongoing effort either (nor strategically, I'm afraid to add, given Moz's trajectory).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#114

Post by whydoyoucare » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

Does Thunderbird even exist today? I moved away from it a long time ago, the sluggishness was a big turn off and it never improved. When I discovered sylpheed and then claws-mail, it was bye-bye TB.

Of course now that I am old, mutt has become my preferred MUA. Does email pretty well, and keeps away from a lot of modern overhead.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#115

Post by hbn » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

I have to assume with the talk of how hard it is to keep up with Firefox's upstream breaking changes, they'll be switching to essentially a Firefox version of an electron app. i.e. shipping Firefox as a wrapper around a webapp

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#116

Post by angst_ridden » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

I've found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts.

I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to ingest everything. Every month or so, I delete everything older than a month from Thunderbird, and rely on MailBackupX for my historical mail reference, searches, etc.

Now Thunderbird is fast and responsive.

My partner keeps hundreds of thousands of emails in Thunderbird from tens of email accounts, some active, some dead. Last time I looked, it was well over a terabyte of old email. The computer, a reasonably recent and fast Mac, can take several hours to start Thunderbird. That being said, I'm impressed it can handle that much cruft at all.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#117

Post by jeltz » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #94

s3p wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, because they have already done that (except on Firefox instead of Chromium).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#118

Post by Mathnerd314 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

haunter wrote: post #75

I wish Eudora was still around. The source code is available, my secret dream is to work on somtimes in the summer... https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

My parents still run Eudora 7, can't convince them to switch to anything else...

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#119

Post by layer8 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

jeltz wrote: post #117

layer8 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, because they have already done that (except on Firefox instead of Chromium).

Do they use JavaScript outside the UI?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#120

Post by txdm » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

angst_ridden wrote: post #116

I've found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts. I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to in…

| after migrating from SeaMonkey

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.