FYI, Thunderbird 115 is getting released tomorrow (July 11). Right now, if you visit the Thunderbird website [1] or try to look for updates within the application, you won't find this release version available (you can always get the beta release from the website).
Thunderbird 115
101–110 of 358 posts
Re: Thunderbird 115
#102[deleted]
Re: Thunderbird 115
#103As a long-term Thunderbird user, it saddens me to see the direction in which this client's development is heading, and I am seriously considering making a change. There are a few things I am discontented with, like the rather amateurish look and feel of the app. On top of that, there are many basic client features missing, such as templates (drafts are horrendous) and send later functionality (right now, I think I'm using about 2 add-ons, each of which is awful to use).
Re: Thunderbird 115
#104From the screenshots, 102 looks better IMHO.
Re: Thunderbird 115
#105Just be curious why are people still using email client other than web based one? Gmail or outlook 365 is quite good, and I think most people will have one web browser opened always.
Because I like all my email in one place basically. I don't want to hunt for tabs whenever I'm looking for specific mail account, mentally all my mail is behind one icon separate from my browser, and they all look and work the same. Also maybe not Gmail but aside from that IMHO Thunderbird offers better UX than all other browser mail apps.
Personally I hate GMail.
1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.
2. Deleting many messages is very slow. With Thunderbird I can mash while scanning subjects and pause for a second to see the actual message body. I get a lot of email that I need to sort through or be aware of so my morning generally consists of quickly (15min) going through up to 100 conversions and getting quick status updates or just deleting uninteresting threads. For whatever reason doing this in GMail is a complete slog. (I'm not sure why, they have the shortcut to archive and have a preview pane but it is just way slower, maybe they need to precache a few messages on either side of the current one?)
3. Threads are based on subject meaning that unrelated messages get grouped together. (Apparently this was changed in 2019 (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-ch...) but I've definitely seen this issue for at least a year after that announcement when I stopped using GMail)
I do admit that most of GMail is pretty good. But for me these limitations are enough to really impede my workflow. I've found that Thunderbird is the least-bad option for me. However Thunderbird's performance is quite poor. I do have 350k messages downloaded locally but even opening my empty inbox sometimes causes lockups. IIUC this is because Thunderbird is mostly single-threaded but apparently there is progress slowly being made here. For example composing messages used to frequently lock up for a few seconds but I haven't seen that in a couple years.
Re: Thunderbird 115
#106I can't believe how janky this still looks after a UI overhaul. Text is misaligned in lots of places, the icons are fuzzy, spacing and padding is inconsistent even within the same areas, there are 3 sets of 3-dot icons in the sidebar in two different axes. It's just careless. Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This…
You can participate in the Thunderbird UX discussions on Topicbox (and also through email) and provide your suggestions/critiques at https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/ux
Re: Thunderbird 115
#107I can't believe how janky this still looks after a UI overhaul. Text is misaligned in lots of places, the icons are fuzzy, spacing and padding is inconsistent even within the same areas, there are 3 sets of 3-dot icons in the sidebar in two different axes. It's just careless. Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This…
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/get-involved/ Your professional input may be desired. Though I did not contribute to Thunderbird either (, yet?). Thing is, your critique may result in guidance to make part of these changes according to your skillset! But I am just a hopeless dreamer in the good of many things.
I think if the team are shipping it in this state then either: they don't have the ability to notice the issues on the core team, or they see the issues and ship it anyway. Feedback like this is unlikely to solve either of those cases.
This isn't complex stuff either. I'm not a designer, I don't even do frontend/UI work, I'm basically just a backend engineer. If I'm spotting this stuff on first glance at the main marketing screenshot, which should be the best possible case, then this stuff must be glaringly obvious and pervasive.
Re: Thunderbird 115
#108FYI, Thunderbird 115 is getting released tomorrow (July 11). Right now, if you visit the Thunderbird website [1] or try to look for updates within the application, you won't find this release version available (you can always get the beta release from the website). [1]: https://www.thunderbird.net/
I would advise against installing the beta for anyone considering it. I was in the beta for 2 years (mostly because it's quite challenging to get out of the beta), and the quality of the beta releases leaves a lot to be desired.
Re: Thunderbird 115
#109I can't believe how janky this still looks after a UI overhaul. Text is misaligned in lots of places, the icons are fuzzy, spacing and padding is inconsistent even within the same areas, there are 3 sets of 3-dot icons in the sidebar in two different axes. It's just careless. Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This…
Agree. The differences between the mock-up [1] and the finished version [2] are both quite small, yet make a massive difference in the perceived quality.
[1] https://2165533704-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-p...
[2] https://www.thunderbird.net/media/img/thunderbird/whatsnew/1...
The search bar looks good in the mock-up, but bad in the final version due to not being centered, despite being really similar.
Re: Thunderbird 115
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can only imagine how terrible the web version of a complex software like Excel will be. It's actually not that terrible, but I believe it's nowhere near feature parity. Not to mention there is a galaxy of add-ons that still need to be rewritten from scratch to work on the web version, and a lot of people cannot live without them. Excel is a classic case of 80% of users requiring 20% of all functionality, but that…
If you don't have feature parity, you really are in trouble, because then you are competing with Google Sheets, on which actually competent engineers are working.
It's not the competence of the individuals that makes the difference. Microsoft is also full of Very Smart People. Organizational structure and ego management strategies drive the engineering choices that lead to bad software.