Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

mail.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 243 posts

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#121

Post by JadeNB »

interfixus wrote: post #87
cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

Not a one. Have run it for years and years and years, overloaded with extensions. It has never failed me. But this! The post outlines a three year timeframe. I do not believe it. I believe Mozilla will be gone before three years, and Thunderbird with it, one way or the other.

> I believe Mozilla will be gone before three years, and Thunderbird with it, one way or the other.

That's a dramatic prediction! Why do you believe it?

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#122

Post by Certhas »

5ilv3r wrote: post #43
Certhas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Thunderbird is moving away from legacy technology that was built to make Mozilla/Firefox more than just a browser. They are doing this to be free to improve Firefox to make it more stable, fast, secure and minimal. This leads to a completely independent Mozilla project, Thunderbird, that relied on this technology to get the axe. That project thus is discussing taking the difficult technical step to start from scra…

The resource allocation decisions mozilla has been making is driving me away from their products. Throwing resources at recreating thunderbird with a new framework is a poor use of their time.

You are still not paying attention. Mozilla has decided to _not_ throw resources at Thunderbird anymore. The outcome of that is that the _community_ is debating to move away from the to be deprecated XUL platform.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#124

Post by jancsika »

frik wrote: post #117
jancsika wrote: post #44

> We must pay attention to also keep technical qualities that many of our users rely on. An obvious one is that the new implementation must be able to quickly scroll through a list of up to 100000 messages. Does any cross-platform GUI toolkit have a widget that can handle this with sane defaults?

> quickly scroll through a list of up to 100000 messages. You can do this with JS and HTML. There are some popular small JS libs that do just that. It works like this: it creates a div with a very big "height" value to get the scrollbar look like there is a long list, and JS just loads in the visible area plus a few items above and below, and reloads data as you scroll. It works very good in Chrome and Firefox, and e…

Does it still work well if I click-drag the scrollbar very quickly from the top to the middle or bottom of the list? Or if I use a keyboard shortcut to jump immediately to beginning or end?

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#125

Post by forgotpwtomain »

_eht wrote: post #104
problems wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way personally. I feel like I see tons of people complaining about it, but it's just what I want out of a mail client. The UI is a great, the GPG integration is great with enigmail, it's a very polished product. Not only that, but making one based on web technologies that moves away from the native look and feel it currently has would truly be a loss in my opinion. I'd probably give Claws Mail and alp…

It's an incredible product as-is, but I feel like they are stuck between a rock and a hard place with moving forward and forecasting beyond the immediate future. I don't see why a new implementation couldn't maintain the current UI/native feel outside of poor decision making. I could see it as a net positive, with cleaner easier to maintain code base built on more recent tech that is more accommodating to younger dev…

> If they could pull off what Atom.io/Github did for the old ingrained IDE world in a mail client, that would be incredible, IMO.

You mean give hipster programmers an editor where one can literally see the delay between typing and something appearing on the screen?

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#126

Post by losteric »

CJefferson wrote: post #93
cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

The search is unusable -- wedding finds 'weds'. There is no way to do exact searching. I reported this 5 years ago, lots of other people have complained about the stemming, there has been no fix. There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era. IMAP folder support is very flakey, I reported some bugs but nothing got fixed.

It sounds like search needs a patch bounty, but it would be ridiculous to rewrite Thunderbird because search is naively implemented.

I've never had problems with IMAP, nor do I use Exchange, so I can't speak to those...

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#127

Post by Silhouette »

jcranmer wrote: post #113
Silhouette wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes a lot of sense if we're talking about using Gecko to render the contents of arbitrary HTML emails. However, this proposal seems to be about problems supporting the UI itself and proposing a move to some other JS+HTML rendering system as an alternative. At first glance, that appears to be a separate issue, other than both types of functionality possibly relying on Gecko today and rendering engines being qui…

Gecko is actually quite difficult to embed (Mozilla more or less gave up on there existing non-Firefox/Thunderbird embeddings around 2011 or so). There's a lot of low-level interfaces and design decisions that filter through Thunderbird, for example networking interfaces. Once you talk about moving to a different rendering engine for the UI, you're more or less talking about ripping out ¾ of the backend code or so an…

Once you talk about moving to a different rendering engine for the UI, you're more or less talking about ripping out ¾ of the backend code or so anyways.

Right, but isn't the argument quite a few people are making here that moving to a different UI rendering engine doesn't seem to be obviously justified, given the goals of the project and its current situation? If the architecture is as inter-dependent and non-modular as your comments suggest, wouldn't that make changing significant parts of it even less likely to be successful?

At that kind of level, you might be better putting the whole project into legacy mode with emergency updates only, and just letting it carry on for as long as it's useful and then die of natural causes when the time is right. For the other goals mentioned in the original proposal we were talking about, if there's sufficient interest to support doing that much work then an entirely new project with no baggage at all seems like a safer and more realistic bet.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#129

Post by noja »

CJefferson wrote: post #93
cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

The search is unusable -- wedding finds 'weds'. There is no way to do exact searching. I reported this 5 years ago, lots of other people have complained about the stemming, there has been no fix. There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era. IMAP folder support is very flakey, I reported some bugs but nothing got fixed.

The search is not unusable, I use it every day. It could be better though, and I get the feeling it could plan the query more efficiently too. I think it needs a better query syntax for those hard to find e-mails.
Post reply on HN