The Thunderbird UI evolved to be everything for every use case, and therefore nothing to everyone. A coherent,
opinionated subset of UI features (and keybindings) would be really welcome.
The Future of Thunderbird
231–240 of 473 posts
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#232> “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…
Yes, I love the UI of Thunderbird and its superior UI is the only reason I still use it despite the horrific performance issues.
Same. I wouldn't put up with this from any other app. In the last few months it has taken to seizing up for 2-10 seconds at a time in the middle of writing. I've been holding out hope a new release will magically get better. Or that I'll dig deep into what's going on and figure out what the cause is. But switching over to webmail is getting more and more tempting.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#233I'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…
> Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index my whole mailbox.
Nice to have confirmation of this very irritating bug! When something isn't found in Thunderbird I now resort to searching in Fastmail's web interface.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#234> “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…
I wonder how many thunderbird devs read HN - I would guess a lot. It really sounds like they are focused the wrong problems with the rebuild.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm.. Not sure how modern that NTFS would have to be. Firefox and Minecraft had to do modifications to avoid the issue of slow file access and slow reads of folders full of small files. Hedgewars too. I feel these weren't the only cases. And none of those had anything to do with Explorer. But, it might have improved, and might be "good enough" for email.
So much depends on the specific APIs, of course, and how many versions of Windows you are expecting to support, and what your seek patterns and locking expectations/behavior are. (In my experience, it has been misunderstandings of the Windows file lock model/ACL lookups that seem more often the problem than directory size, but obviously everyone's benchmarks are different. File locks are super "slow", especially if y…
'k. take your word for it. Esp in relation to Maildir.
I know very little about Windows development.
But... just, FWIW, this particular subject has come up a lot on HN over the years with various explanations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783525 and many many others easily searchable on hn.algolia.com
My fav comment was by an MS dev: "NTFS code is a purple opium-fueled Victorian horror novel that uses global recursive locks and SEH for flow control."
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. 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 ne…
There are a lot of qualifiers there. The linked post by Thunderbird’s Product Design manager spends a lot of time talking about tech debt and feature availability, and not so much about problems with the interface. Indeed, it has a reassuring amount of respect for the current interface, describing a future that "allow[s] veteran users to maintain that familiarity they love".
It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#237T-Bird is still my primary email app on my Mac. Apple's "Mail" app fine too but it's great to see the T-Bird team is willing to modernize it with a complete rewrite.
The last T-Bird update was really pretty good considering the old code they were working with so I'm excited to see them take this path.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#238> “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…
Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB. It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking." But quirk…
I am seeing similar results. That being said, I'm only using thunderbird on Windows, so I can't speak to Mac/Linux perf.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My suggestion would be to wait and see. They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options. I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to a…
> My suggestion would be to wait and see.
This is what I'm going with. We use Thunderbird for work and as long they don't kill of functionality and disrupt what we're doing I don't really care what Thunderbird looks like.
I'm a little worried about a bunch of new bugs, especially ones that result in data loss though. As things change I may be pushing back on updates for a while just to make sure things are stable.
If things go bad, I'll have to look for forks or set up something else that can reasonably handle IMAP and supports MBOX
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#240Unfortunately, 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…
There must be something weird about your setup. I have 40k messages in my Inbox & everything is snappy: Mailbox operations complete immediately.
I delete a lot of email so I don't have more than a few k messages in an email account, but I have 3 of accounts setup in T-Bird and it's always been very snappy.