Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#121

Post by zelphirkalt »

nerdponx wrote: post #92
TheRealPomax wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tradit…

I will probably need to look for alternatives, if I catch any sniff of "we are an electron app now" or similar. In that case I will probably only use the older version as a lookup program for past e-mails, if I cannot import them into something else. Or I stick with an old version of Thunderbird.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#122

Post by nocman »

evanwang0 wrote: post #80

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

Seems odd to me to describe using a Chromium-based toolkit as a way to break the Chrome monoculture. Yeah, I know it is open source, but the ties are still obvious.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#124

Post by donatzsky »

mr_machine wrote: post #54

I've used Thunderbird exclusively for desktop mail for many years. To my knowledge, it still sucks less than any other free and open option, but that's not much of a bar. Over time, Thunderbird has become slower and less reliable, most notably in the area of search. While the advanced search tools are excellent, the results are lousy. Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index…

> The interface is fine and there are far bigger problems -- problems related to actual functionality as opposed to prettiness -- that desperately need work.

You may want to read the blog post again. This isn't just about a new UI, it's about overhauling the codebase in general, so that they can improve all aspects.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#125

Post by mardifoufs »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #121
nerdponx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tradit…

I will probably need to look for alternatives, if I catch any sniff of "we are an electron app now" or similar. In that case I will probably only use the older version as a lookup program for past e-mails, if I cannot import them into something else. Or I stick with an old version of Thunderbird.

I mean thunderbird is already running on an entire browser stack. Wouldn't electron be similar to what thunderbird is already using?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#126

Post by unethical_ban »

Almost everyone in here has a complaint about thunderbird. The blog is about the struggle of maintaining it as-is, much less refactoring or adding features.

They take the time to explain some background, some of the struggles and the "why" of their decision to do a rebuild. Reliance on other software, years of decentralized development, having a small team to do it.

And yet everyone is just shitting on this piece as if the team has no idea what they're doing.

I don't normally do metacommentary, but this conversation is mind boggling.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#127

Post by bugmen0t »

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.

Frankly, it's surprising how long they managed to drag it along given they build on top of a weird fork of Firefox ESR. Their foundation is crumbling for years and years. They really need to get off of it.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#128

Post by timbit42 »

fsh wrote: post #37
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #3

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” If it works...

For me it doesn't really work. Searching any large folder completely stalls the UI for a few seconds. How can it be so slow to go through a bit of text?

That's nothing to do with how it looks or why the UI stalls. That's a problem with the search. Just fix the search.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#129

Post by psim1 »

I kind of hate Thunderbird because it is in every way worse than beloved Apple Mail.app, except for one: it can do the Microsoft 365 IMAP Oauth2 dance, but Mail.app can't.

Mail.app's native Exchange functionality has broken for me before and caused me to lose mail so I will not trust it. I thought I had the right solution with an IMAP connection to O365 Exchange until they forced that to use Oauth2.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#130

Post by devmunchies »

vlod wrote: post #28

If they are looking for paths going forward, I hope they investigate what PopOS is doing with rust (COSMIC) [0] and Iced [1] (cross platform ui library). [0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit [1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

I read "A cross-platform GUI library for Rust" but never saw any specifics. Is this targeting MacOS, Windows, Linux?
Post reply on HN