Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

Not sure about the history, I think I used the search-functionality pre-2020, as it is, but maybe it was a button back then.

> re. tabbar

Yes, I have that open permanently, it is an option in the normal settings. I don't like the UI to yank around and I will have another tab open anyways.

I think I would accept getting rid of the search bar, when I get a button instead and the bar is ripped out entirely, like you suggest in the sibling comment.

> You can't search and filter on the same tab

Yes you can, that's what I claim. You convert the search results into a list and then you can use the filter as always.

This is kind of the point, why I object to you converting the filter bar into a search bar: Because the filter doesn't work on any physical existing folder, it works on whatever happens to be in the current list, even if that are search results or a conversation view. Changing that to work on other not displayed folders will be very inconsistent, because that is a different functionality. THIS is my distinction between filtering and searching. A filter won't come up with random different messages from somewhere-else, it only works on the already closed set of selected messages.

> everything people write me is... gigantic to say at least

You know you can press C--, right ?

> And yes, literally 30% of the screen is not displaying anything useful

Yeah, after running the numbers I am more convinced why you want to get rid of the search-bar. Maybe I have stockholm syndrome . :-) This is sadly a general trend, but I get used to it. Recently I started scaling the other way, making everything smaller then I have pixels, but this makes everything very blurry and text hard to read, since it gets smaller than a pixel. But still in this case I think it is useful to have that bar, and it wouldn't yield any space, since we won't get rid of that bar entirely, it will be completely empty besides that "hamburger" menu.

When TB devs would be sane to get rid of that bar, they could keep the search bar somewhere else (like v102).

> And in my opinion the current design isn't good for regular Joe.

I think I always need to enable the filter pane, when I want to use it, so it is only there when I really intend to filter, it wouldn't cause confusion when searching, because it is not there most of the time.

But maybe the average user doesn't restarts programs all that often.

> https://ibb.co/WWFt3mnd

Wait did you crop the search bar out, or is there a way to disable it???

Do you have disabled the button descriptions or why do I have them and you don't?

>>> Hi there was just a release where they deleted

Oh, no. Guess I will eventually upgrade to ~v91 again and leave it like this and hope there won't be any vulnerabilities. I already did that once for Firefox 45, but websites got to much functionality to fast, so I needed to "downgrade" to a newer version eventually.

I didn't knew it for long, since I continue using an existing installation, but do you know, how a new installation looks like? It basically only starts with the "hamburger" menu and a big screen of that thunderbird website. You basically need to bootstrap the UI, to get anything useful. First you enable the menubar and then you can start enabling all the other UI.

Thanks for the discussion, I think we have maybe more to agree then I initially thought. Design seams to be more controversial then I considered. But what are all this "designers" even doing? Why do we get more and more pixels just to display white void? Maybe the designers will agree on some areas to always display whitespace and then we can remove pixels from some areas to reduce costs. /s

I think you still didn't get my semantic argument about filtering vs. searching, but whatever. I think the filter bar is some of the subtil and consistent things in the UI, since it resides inside the listview and filters inside that listview. Anyways if you aren't yet tired of the discussion, what do you dislike about v102?

> There are things in 102 UI which I don't like too.