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

411–420 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#411

Post by midoridensha »

donkeyd wrote: post #85
anamexis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using Gmail, I can recommend Mimestream [1]. It's still in beta, but I've been using it for the better part of a year without issue. Fast, simple, clean. [1] https://mimestream.com/

Have to say I dislike the fact that Mimestream will cost money, but they don't say how much yet. I don't want to get used to something that will then cost more than I can afford. I don't mind paying, at all, but if it's going to be a €5 a month subscription that'll be too much for me, for example.

This sounds like a great business model actually: release a killer software product, and make the beta free to get users addicted, with the caveat that when you get out of beta, there will be a "small" monthly fee. Then, when it's time to go mainstream, charge them $100/month to keep access to their data. And make sure there's no way to go back by locking the users' data behind encryption for "safety from hackers" or similar.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#412

Post by account42 »

chefandy wrote: post #397
orbital223 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

A common sentiment (which I share) is that Firefox has less and less to distiguish itself from Chrome(ium). Along with compatibility issues (even if they are rare and not Firefox's fault) there is less and less reason to choose it. Being as good as Chrome is not good enough to maintain users when Google is agressively pushing their browser in ways that Mozilla simply can't.

So why would anyone use Firefox over chrome?

Because it is open source? Sure, but so is Chromium. But both seem to have mostly cathedral-style development and someone outside of Mozilla is unlikely to be able to influence the direction of the project in any meaningful way. It's open source software but not an open source project. User feedback is continuously ignored, often with the only argument being developer convenience.

Because of a focus on privacy? While they do like to push that angle in their marketing and in some ways do more to prevent websites from tracking you they show little concern for making the browser itself respect your privacy with opt out telemetry, eperiments, in-browser advertising and more. Again, any user pushback is summarily dismissed.

The only remaining advantage are some niche features here and there. And those are often provided by extension whose API Mozilla limits more and more.

So I still use Firefox but its only because it is the lesser evil, and the differrence is shrinking. I certainly don't trust Mozilla's autoupdates and won't use upstream builds. Thankfully Linux distros still provide a last defense layer - but that we need that layer at all for something that is supposed to be an open browser is ridiculous. I don't fault anyone who says fuck it and just uses Chrome so that ALL sites work out of the box.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#413

Post by account42 »

ziftface wrote: post #321
bawolff wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true, but i think its overstated. To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become the off-brand version of whoever is the marke…

The layout I expect Thunderbird to move towards is the one in every mail client I've used in the past decade, I wouldn't call that trendy. At this point you're an outlier so you better have a good reason to stick to the different UI.

Which one is that? Gmail and Outlook have very different (default) layouts.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#415

Post by account42 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #206
capitainenemo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir formats already. It's why the compact option exists for mbox since delete only removes the index key until you trigger a compact. Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients. I feel like just switching to maildir acro…

Modern NTFS doesn't have as much of a problem with folders full of files as its reputation states. Though File Explorer always still seems to make it seem slower/worse than it is. (Most of that is still things like populating thumbnail caches and stuff, though, more than actual disk performance.) The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which is not a…

AFAIU the problem isn't so much NTFS but the (pluggable) Win32 filesystem layers above. It gets even worse with AV software plugging itself into those layers.

Packing individual resources into archives is the norm for Games for a reason.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#416

Post by account42 »

migf wrote: post #346
imiric wrote: post #203

I'll add one more negative sentiment. > Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point. No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"? The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional b…

The thing is, people want to read html emails. MS outlook doesn't need a web browser to run, because it uses ... MS Word to render emails, which if you've ever tried to send formatted emails programmatically you'll know it's a dark, dark state of affairs.

Good. Pretty much all emails I care about would be better off without any formatting beyond what e.g. Markdown provide - and that subset of HTML works well enough in Outlook.

I dread the day that Google manages to grab enough of Outlook's marketshare so that they can dictate the direction of email just like they have been doing to the web - we're almost there already.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#418

Post by hbossy »

>A renewed attention to usability and accessibility is now part of our daily development process, guaranteeing easy discoverability of all the powerful features, as well as full compatibility with assistive technologies to make Thunderbird usable by everyone.

ah yes, that logorrhea of corporate speak surely means the project is heading in right direction.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#419

Post by lawgimenez »

geokon wrote: post #370
lawgimenez wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.

I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process But.. it seems like a solveable problem..

This is what the Mail app in macOS does. Disappear in background, outbox for the moment and let me compose another email.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#420

Post by jeltz »

chefandy wrote: post #397
orbital223 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

No, but I think they would have if they have continued to develop their own interface iteratively without just blindly copying Chrome. Right now there is for many no reason to pick Firefox over Chrome because they are so similar.
Post reply on HN