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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#211

Post by throw0101a »

throwawayapples wrote: post #201
_cenw wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I see what you're saying, but wouldn't it be also great if there was a mail app that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.

> that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.

If you want something really small, perhaps mutt in a terminal could work. :)

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#212

Post by superkuh »

renewiltord wrote: post #153
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.

You can turn off auto-updates or build off a present revision. Those won't go away.

Yeah, I did. I technically use a thunderbird fork. It'd be a shame if the extension ecosystem split though.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#213

Post by aorth »

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'd understand if you just resisted the UI changes. In the video they discuss serious underlying technical debt. Thunderbird is twenty years old now and most of us have technical debt on projects that are a fraction of that age!

I support the revived energy around the Thunderbird project and I trust that they will not betray old and loyal power users. Looking forward to future releases.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#214

Post by alerighi »

Nooooooooo

Why change the UI? I mean, I like Thunderbird exactly since it's the only email client that didn't go into the direction of emulating GMail or Apple Mail or other mail interfaces that shows you the messages in a conversational manner.

I like Thunderbird because it has more or less the same user experience of the old "Outlook" Windows application. Why change something that works???

At least I hope they will give users the possibility to remain with the classical interface, otherwise I think I will still remain on older versions (after all IMAP is relatively stable so I shouldn't have that much issues).

The only thing I would like on Thunderbird is sync of the settings with a Mozilla account like Firefox does. Not that it's a big deal, I just copy around the profile directory (because reconfiguring 10 email accounts each time I change/format the PC takes almost 1 hour).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#215

Post by alerighi »

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…

There are a ton of desktop email clients that have that design: Apple Mail, Windows 10/11 Mail application, Outlook, Mailspring, whatever.

Of client that have the UI/UX of Thunderbird... well only Thunderbird remained. I get that if you use the email sporadically with only one account, you are better with a client like you described, but at that point you can as well use a webmail.

Otherwise if you work with emails, and you manage tens or hundreds of email each day, Thunderbird interface is great, is compact, is essential, is functional. Not pretty, but works well, it's stable, it's reliable.

Thunderbird is a work tool, and a work tool to me doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#216

Post by nashashmi »

They are most definitely changing the UI to be white space fancy and in-line with new users. It is a reset of features. That’s what they are doing with K9 too.

Not the direction I was hoping they would go in.

They should forget the rewrite. And forget the UI change. They should separate the UI stuff into a different module. And let others innovate on it. They should only focus on maintenance changes with Firefox.

And then add new features. Like external linked attachment technology. Snoozing emails. Sorting emails based on content. Unsubscribe highlighting. Scraping incoming emails for patterns. Machine learning for Outgoing emails.

And finally, they really need to get into the email server game. Innovation can’t only be happening in the client.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#217

Post by ubermonkey »

I wish Tbird would become usable for me, but every time I try, it falls very very short in polish, in performance, and in capability.

Mac's native Mail program works super super well for me and my enormous corpus of mail, search is nearly instant, and it talks to IMAP and Exchange with ease. It's also reasonably easy to look at. I get some folks don't care for it, and I absolutely concede that the old saw about "the worst one, except for all the others" still applies, but for me, Tbird is just one of "all the others."

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#218

Post by safety1st »

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.

Thunderbird sucks, full send. I love free software and I've used TB for ten years because it's bundled with lots of Linux distros. But one paragraph into the post they are making excuses for how bad they are: "Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?"

I'm definitely not complaining about the UI "looking old" - I like UIs that are old, they are simple! But Thunderbird is glitchy, sluggish, and plagued by idiotic design decisions (for example, why the fuck do they make it hard for me to include attachments in a reply? super obvious example of some cranky "principled" programmer who's happy to give the middle finger to Thunderbird's actual users).

We're on TB for one reason - we're too busy to evaluate replacements. If/when we find the time to evaluate other clients we will absolutely replace it. The post stinks of hostility toward their users, which is unfortunately no surprise with Thunderbird.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#219

Post by einpoklum »

rvz wrote: post #33

The Future of Thunderbird can only be summarized as having no future with Mozilla. > Throughout the years, Mozilla’s focus shifted a lot, investing less and less resources into the development of Thunderbird. On July 6, 2012, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would no longer be focused on innovations for Thunderbird, and that the future Thunderbird development would transition to a community-driven model. So i…

Mozilla is in close and tight control again these days - much tighter than you know.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#220

Post by kitsunesoba »

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…

The design doesn’t look too bad to me, with exception to that big empty top bar. It feels really awkward.
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