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Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

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Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#41
post #33
post #20

I wish they had a real IMAP/SMTP support and not some kind of unreliable service you have to run locally that does a bridge. GPG key management is also a disaster. So they made it easy to communicate with others using proton fine, but communicating with non-proton users with GPG is a horrible experience.

Is it worst that other GPG solutions, or is it a bad experience due to GPG being… let’s say complicated? I’ve been using proton a lot because I like their products but don’t have a use case for GPG.

In thunderbird it was super easy for example. In mutt as well but required a tiny bit of initial setup (but then 0 maintenance).

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#42
post #17

I love Proton, I use them for my business. Sure they are missing some things. The calendar is too basic, no widget. Drive does not have a Linux client and no rsync support or anything useful. And now there is no desktop app For Linux (it's not electron?). BUT, I love the webapp and they bring a steady stream of nice improvements, and what currently exists works very well. They are a company with the right values so I…

I rather their app not be Electron not much would have needed to be done just mostly point it at their website at that point…

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#43
post #8

Out of curiosity, what makes people prefer desktop apps for mail over just visiting the browser version? The idea of downloading a desktop app for something I can do in the browser makes no sense to me. At least on mobile, the ergonomics of apps tend to make the experience better than the mobile-web version.

Being able to read mail offline, not waiting on emails to load, and I am sure others have clients they prefer.

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#44
post #18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship has sailed. If I look at my Dock right now, from left to right I'm running: - Nautilus - Brave (Chromium) - Gnome-terminal - VSCode (Electron) - Telegram Desktop (̶E̶l̶e̶c̶t̶r̶o̶n̶ QT)[1] - WhatsApp (web wrapper in Electron)[1] - Discord (Electron) - Spotify (Chromium Embedded Framework) - Betterbird (Gecko, might as well be Electron) - TickTick (Electron) - Steam (Chromium Embedded Framework) In a way it i…

> Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS It’s not Chromium based but Apple does have exactly this in the OS. Given both Chromium and WebKit target the same web standards there should be a solid crossover. The reality isn’t there but it wouldn’t take much (except for willingness on Apple’s part, which is hard to come by)

Yeah I know Apple has their own WkWebview (maybe they were even the first? not sure). But as you pointed out, it requires devs to look out for any edge cases / missing features it has in comparison to Chromium's Webview.

The nice thing about a universal Webview is that devs no longer have to spend time testing across web engines. All they would have to do is test against a few generations of Chromium.

I know that's not a thing free software stans like to think about or hear because its already been happening in slow-motion, with less and less devs testing against anything but Chromium, but I feel there are strong benefits to it.

In a way its the SystemD debacle all over again. Centralization like that feels spooky and very un-unixy, but it brings such an enormous host of benefits.

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#45
post #23
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

webmail works fine without an internet connection, gmail does it. You need to write a PWA.

But do I have a local backup if my webmail provider deletes my account?

PWA does indeed let you cache plenty of data, but I am not familiar with if gmail does this at all or not.

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#46
post #7

I wish Fastmail had a desktop app. Or a mobile app that works when offline, for that matter.

Fastmail has good imap and jmap support. If which there are a great many clients that work offline.

IMAP sure, but are there really many jmap clients to choose from?

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#47
post #17

I love Proton, I use them for my business. Sure they are missing some things. The calendar is too basic, no widget. Drive does not have a Linux client and no rsync support or anything useful. And now there is no desktop app For Linux (it's not electron?). BUT, I love the webapp and they bring a steady stream of nice improvements, and what currently exists works very well. They are a company with the right values so I…

I rather their app not be Electron not much would have needed to be done just mostly point it at their website at that point…

On Linux it’s often: it’s electron or you’re left out.

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#48
Maybe this will turn out to be a very good thing, but with the degraded quality of their mobile app and the languishing state of the web app, I can't help but feel like a desktop app for Proton Mail is a distraction at this point. Granted, there is a rewrite of their mobile app in progress to fix serious performance issues, but that should be finished first before even thinking about a brand new desktop app.

At the same time, the idea that we need vendor-specific email applications really sucks. In decades past, we had email applications that could support multiple email accounts from multiple vendors. Proton Mail is a bit of a special case in that regard, which results in it needing to provide a bridge application and now apparently a desktop app, but it really shouldn't be. If independent email applications aren't adequate for peoples' basic needs in 2023 and can't provide straight forward support for things like Proton Mail, then those applications should be fixed.

But that's just crazy talk, I know. Nothing can be interoperable.

Re: Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

#50
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship has sailed. If I look at my Dock right now, from left to right I'm running: - Nautilus - Brave (Chromium) - Gnome-terminal - VSCode (Electron) - Telegram Desktop (̶E̶l̶e̶c̶t̶r̶o̶n̶ QT)[1] - WhatsApp (web wrapper in Electron)[1] - Discord (Electron) - Spotify (Chromium Embedded Framework) - Betterbird (Gecko, might as well be Electron) - TickTick (Electron) - Steam (Chromium Embedded Framework) In a way it i…

> Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS and optimize it to the gills. For MacOS, you can almost always get high quality native apps. I don't know why this isn't the case on other platforms. Strangely enough, it is mostly the mega-corps that insist on not making native apps, even though they should have all resources for it: VSCode, Spotify…

>laggy garbage apps if you don't have the latest machine.

Does not describe Youtube.com or VSCode in my experience.

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