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

181–190 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#181

Post by jraph »

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.

I like that Thunderbird exactly looks like what it looked like when I started using it in 2005, 18 years ago (save for the OS theme in use).

Though I would not mind some refresh. Many (younger? and as young as me, actually) people who are used to webmails and mobile apps find it ugly, and I can see that.

The world is missing a fast and efficient desktop mail client that looks good and I'd be glad if Thunderbird were it.

There's a world in which the Thunderbird team understands they have a huge number of long time users and they should be careful to keep it usable for them, where they will take feedback and in which they build something that doesn't suck for people who don't now it yet, and this world could be ours.

Wait and see? I understand the concern and that many people are worried, I also don't quite like the trend of UIs with a lot of space lacking contrast everywhere, but I think a good outcome is actually likely.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#182

Post by mixmastamyk »

Everyone complaining about performance should try this:

Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.

I put this in my cleanup script. Don’t know why they don’t do it automatically after each upgrade to new version?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#183

Post by mulmen »

jraph wrote: post #181
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.

I like that Thunderbird exactly looks like what it looked like when I started using it in 2005, 18 years ago (save for the OS theme in use). Though I would not mind some refresh. Many (younger? and as young as me, actually) people who are used to webmails and mobile apps find it ugly, and I can see that. The world is missing a fast and efficient desktop mail client that looks good and I'd be glad if Thunderbird were…

No. If you want a “pretty” email client go make one and see how it does. Stability is the number one feature I want in a UI. The only other concern is responsiveness. Literally nothing else matters.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#184

Post by jraph »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #163
mardifoufs wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought XUL had been removed?

XUL is still hiding in there I think, though most things in Firefox have been rewritten in regular HTML. Not sure about Thunderbird, though the new settings page suspiciously looks like the Firefox one, so if not everything has been migrated yet, some stuff definitely have.

Either way, Gecko is what renders XUL and HTML, and therefore Thunderbird. It's essentially a big chunk of web stuff. It has always been this way.

Though I think Gecko is a tad more memory efficient than Chromium / Electron, and a lot nicer to use than your average Electron app.

And I'm pretty certain Thunderbird is staying this way. Becoming an Electron app would be a huge rewrite, and I think Thunderbird devs like Gecko. They say it in the blog post. It's not happening.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#185

Post by mixmastamyk »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #174

So much negativity in this thread, jeez. I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04. Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one be…

Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

And that is the main problem, new designer shows up and doesn’t bother to implement the previous layout or workflow. Effectively hobbling the interface when all us real users wanted were bug fixes.

Hopefully won’t happen this time.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#187

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

reaperducer wrote: post #35
miroljub wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast, especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me, so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear in multiple folders without affecting performance. I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so…

I remember it was crazy fast I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware. I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk. Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

> Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

If they're basically stacked on top of 90% of firefox (which is how I understand it to work), then it's not necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top of a framework that gets bloated.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#188

Post by jraph »

mplanchard wrote: post #168
toomim wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange comment. Thunderbird is for email, not the web. Are the people who want it to change confused about the difference between smtp and http?

In TFA it says that Thunderbird is built on top of Firefox, which makes it difficult for them to keep up and causes a lot of churn and bugs. I imagine that’s what the parent poster is referring to.

Yes, and today, to render mails, you need a web engine. Unless you only want to deal with text email but that comes from with its fair share of tradeoffs, including the occasional unreadable email in text… which you'll open in a web browser.

And as a mail client you'd better follow the security fixes of the web engine you are using.

I guess not everyone is willing to use an old web engine derived from an old version of Word and maintain this thing for the eternity.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#189

Post by ruuda »

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.

Thunderbird does store emails in SQLite databases.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#190

Post by mistrial9 »

flomo wrote: post #96
DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues

unlike the reliable and standards-based clients on Windows, you mean?

Post reply on HN