191–200 of 473 posts
> ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users
What percentage is that, I wonder? A large number, or enough to kind of justify replacing the UI if you fudge the numbers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not like it's easy. It crossed my mind a few years ago, actually. But why should I when the email client I actually happen to use decided to actually rebuild its interface? I'm not the one who is unhappy, I'm happy either way actually, I could answer "go fork Thunderbird if you are not happy".
There was an interesting talk at FOSDEM by OpenProject on how to handle UI revamps [1], there are ways to do it without breaking current users. I recommend it, I'm quite picky on presentations but this one was really good and I enjoyed it.
I agree that UI stability is important. UI stability is not the only important thing. Responsiveness indeed too. I hate slow UIs. Consistency with what users are used to (from the rest of the world) is very important too.
What's more, I read in the blog post that they are rebuilding the UI from scratch, but what I don't read is that they decided to change everything.
They can do it right. I can't say they will, but… again, let's see? I'm sure they'd be glad to receive feedback, questions and concerns.
Am I the only one enthusiastic about some potential Thunderbird UI revamp here?
I don't like many UI/UX choices on the current web, but I also like what KDE has been doing, and maybe Gnome too, there are places where UIs get better! Why not Thunderbird?
[1] https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/practical_ux_at_openp...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? ... is Mail not OK?
Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native. It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.
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.
I'd say that you're in a small enough minority that most people will design right past you, just like most websites have an acceptable minimum percentage of browser feature availability after which you can make that feature a requirement for functionality.
Especially as screens tend to get wider, not thinner.
> “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…
That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the…
If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.)
Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.
> [...] And yes, absolutely: the constant addition of new features [...]
Please don't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.
at the very least, check which version you're on. The auto-updater is one of the parts that's unreliable.
* https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbir...
If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.
> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” > ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users What percentage is that, I wonder? A large number, or enough to kind of justify replacing the UI if you fudge the numbers?
When Ars Technica did a redesign a couple of years ago, they didn't launch with a dark mode because their telemetry didn't indicate that many people used it. There were a bunch of comments from users asking for dark mode, so they polled subscribers and the numbers who used dark mode were massively higher than the telemetry indicated. Turns out that the people who used dark mode were also the kinds of people who used strict ad blocker profiles which blocked the telemetry