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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#421

Post by jeltz »

Moru wrote: post #268
ablob wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using thunderbird half a year ago and like the interface. Sure, there's problems (I haven't encountered a lot of them), but the overall user experience is far better than what I'm used to from other email programs. The only thing that stuck out negatively was when I was searching for an email, in which the way I was wanting to solve it didn't work out as I thought it did. (I was looking for a mail containin…

I've been running Thunderbird in the background without problems the last 15-odd years on whatever computer I had at the time. Still do. No performance problems running 20+ mail accounts with loads and loads of mail. Ofcourse it can be slow if you do things that requires TB to recreate the mail storage but other than that I have no problem opening mail and reading it fast. I'm using both IMAP and POP3 accounts mixed.…

I do not think I have touched anything either since I like keeping as much at default as possible, but maybe I have and just do not know it, but it is dog slow for me.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#422

Post by Amezarak »

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?

Yes.

That wouldn't have gained them appreciable new users, but it would have slowed losses. Almost all my browsing is done in Chrome and Brave now. There's not really any reason to use Firefox besides habit now, and I don't, except on my desktop.

Mozilla somehow failed to recognize their entire core userbase was power users and Firefox fans, which relentlessly evangelized the product to other people, going around installing it on grandma's computer.

Then they failed to recognize that while Chrome was a comparable technical product, maybe even slightly better in some ways, the reason for its success it because it was relentlessly shilled by a huge megacorporation that pushed it in advertising, on the world's biggest web properties, and even had it packaged in installers for other products.

Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Chrome by assuming that "if we were just more like Chrome, people would use us", or "we need to make a browser for grandma." Grandma doesn't download browsers. That is, unless a big banner comes up on YouTube telling her she needs to download Chrome for the best experience. By alienating its core "fanbase" or whatever you want to call it, by alienating its power users, Firefox alienated the only demographic it ever had an actual shot with. Unless you count the even-smaller real-open-source-only-we-need-web-freedom demographic.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#423

Post by jeltz »

djha-skin wrote: post #93
formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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…

A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere that this speed difference is due to antivirus.

I run it on Linux and I have issues there.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#424

Post by jeltz »

andix wrote: post #251
iillexial wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.

HN is really bad on touch devices. Call me young and naive, but I mostly read HN on the couch on my tablet.

HN is one of the best web sites for my phone. There are some improvements they could make but I would not call being among the top 5% best mobile websites being "really bad".

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#425

Post by jeltz »

pfp wrote: post #305

Thunderbird still is pretty fast, though not as fast as before. And until the user-hostile changes (mandatory setup wizards) began creeping in a few years back, one of the venerable classics that you could still rely on. Pretty sure the new version is going to be a steaming pile of modern usability horrors; reduced features, cheeseburger menus, unreadable UI elements because it has to "look modern", all powered by El…

Mandatory setup wizards was really horrible and a throwback to the UI design of the late 90s. So modern!

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#426

Post by raxxorraxor »

formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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 have multiple mailboxes, which are quite large. Never saw a performance problem at all and I am dumbfounded what could be the issue for people. Its speed and ease of use is why I prefer it to web mail by a large margin. It starts quicker than my browser too.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#427

Post by dreadnaut »

WalterBright wrote: post #339

My complaint is it should store each email in its own file (like NNTP readers do). This makes it much more amenable to backups, search, and makes it a lot less susceptible to corruption. Instead, Tbird stores one folder in one gigantic file. One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. Yes, I filed bug reports. No, it was never fixed (at least the Tbird developers denied this was a problem)…

> My complaint is it should store each email in its own file

Thunderbird supports one-file-per-email (Maildir) accounts, see settings. It's still marked as "experimental" because of some edge cases, but I have not encountered issues in many years, and it makes for a snappier experience.

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird

> There's still no way to backup my account settings.

Import / Export settings has ben around for a few versions:

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-export

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#428

Post by kieckerjan »

formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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…

This! On my Xubuntu installation(s) the rendering has become so slow to almost be unusable. There were some helpful tips floating around to remedy this situation (turning off webrender seemed to help) but these have stopped working as well.

I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#429

Post by indigochill »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #105
Spivak wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One entity (person/group) with a strong product vision + a giant decentralized workforce is pretty much how everything gets built. The actual people putting hands to keyboard have the mythical man month thing going for them.

The part of mythical man month I was thinking of, which I consider the most famous/useful take-away, is how adding people to a project will not necessarily make it go faster, because the more people, the more coordination work -- and Brooks paid a lot of attention to the fact that the "coordination work" isn't just, like, issuing orders and monitoring people, but involves building and sharing and maintaining "mental…

> it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.

There's a danger here too in that you can iterate on a design in a "monolithic" way where you iterate over a brittle design that's still hard to work with years later because you need to reload the entire system into your brain to make sense of it again.

Looking at Unix as an open source design success story, it was designed in relatively well-defined "layers". So for example it can get away with making literally everything a "file" with a common file interface, even if you're actually working with a physical peripheral or a "black hole" like /dev/null. And on these layers you can build all kinds of different implementations.

I try to push for a similar approach even on proprietary projects because if we can compartmentalize what we need to know to work with the pieces of our systems, they'll be easier to understand with less effort than if we need to understand everything about them before iterating on them.

And this can be passively "encouraged" by how the work is divided across teams/workgroups to leverage Conway's Law (which can also just as easily lead to software components that don't make any engineering sense if people aren't conscious of the effect their organization has on their software's organization).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#430

Post by ziftface »

account42 wrote: post #413
ziftface wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a good point about gmail, but I was thinking of outlook, apple mail, the gnome mail client, and this one called mimestream that I use now. They all have that same familiar 3 column layout: mailboxes, list of messages, message contents. That layout has been the norm for a while, so I think calling it trendy is a bit of a stretch.
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