251–260 of 473 posts
> Why does Thunderbird look so old UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.
It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.
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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,…
I have several accounts and thousands of mails. But I can't see how an efficient tool can't be pretty and how a pretty tool can't be efficient.
I agree with the pros you find to the UI of Thunderbird and that's why I use it. But non-prettiness is not a feature. Prettiness is. For most people, it will be more enjoyable, more so if they spend hours each day using the tool, which is more likely in a work environment.
If it's more enjoyable, more people will use it instead of all these non-free pieces of software you listed (and which I will not use as a consequence), which in turn might bring more funding, which might allow the Thunderbird team to make it even more reliable.
Life is there to be enjoyed and this includes work. I also use thunderbird for my personal email account so it's not just work for me, like many people out there.
Why are we even arguing for non-prettiness? This is madness.
Again, the revamping we are talking about is being done for maintainability reasons, which is what you want for your tool to remain efficient, stable and reliable.
I understand the concerns, UI rewrites are often upsetting, but the amount of resistance to change here is quite impressive.
I don't see the point of not wanting improvements. Of course I won't be happy if Thunderbird becomes less reliable or less efficient but we are not there yet.
I trust the Thunderbird team to do the right things. They have not failed me for almost 20 years. I can't use anything else because I'm too used to its UI, the keyboard shortcuts, everything. The first versions after the rewrite might not work very well and have bugs but we can always wait a bit before upgrading.
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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.
In fairness, if you're as bad as I am at actually deleting email, you probably had something like 15 years less email accumulation. I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.
> “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?
I'd expect it's a large number, because I'd expect that most of the people who like the old UI also turn off telemetry. 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 h…
Projects with highly technical users would be better off listening to forums. It doesn't seem like the folks in /r/Thunderbird are overly concerned with the UI
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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…
Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure that there will be more new users faster than old users leaving. If it doesn't work out, chances are that they ain't coming back.
I can't say anything about keeping TB open and having it steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail. Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht shouldn't create problems, however.
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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 globa…
Part of what certainly doesn't help is that most of the "lots of files in a single folder" applications make other POSIX-based assumptions (such as locks and consistency with respect to concurrency are generally much more opt-in and eventually consistent by default in POSIX rather than opt-out and aggressively consistent by default in Windows). If you are trying to use POSIX-based assumptions on Windows it doesn't matter what you are doing, including "lots of files in a single folder", you are going to have a bad time. I can easily presume that is what happened in most of your anecdotal counter-examples (Java Minecraft, Firefox, Hedgewars, will all have different, plausible POSIX biases), though I can't know for certain without benchmarks and performance data in front of me, and none of those are currently my job. "Lots of files in a single folder" at that point, under that presumption, is a symptom, rather than the root cause. It's very easy to blame the symptom sometimes, especially when that sort of performance debugging/fixing is getting in the way of your real goals and that symptom is sometimes such an easy fix (use more folders, bundle more zips, what have you).
Again, I can't say that with too much certainty without specific performance data, it's just I do think people need to question the "Orthodoxy" of "well, Windows is just bad at that" more than they do sometimes.
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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.
In fairness, if you're as bad as I am at actually deleting email, you probably had something like 15 years less email accumulation. I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.
People delete email?
I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.
(Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)
> Why does Thunderbird look so old UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.
It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.