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

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

#141

Post by nkkollaw »

Silhouette wrote: post #90
nkkollaw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe with web standards (maybe, I'm not sure), but not the rest. Just the fact that the address bar font is the same size as the rest of the UI gives me the impression that they didn't think it through. Downloading files has the same problem, it's relegated in a small button, while it's one of the main features. The whole interface is one of the most unintuitive things I've ever used, considering how simple a browse…

It seems you prefer the more "modern" style of relying on Google's online services and Chrome's frequent updates. That's fine, but it's not an objective standard. For example, some of us consider a UI that doesn't keep moving around every few weeks to be a feature, not a bug. I have absolutely no problem with a practical tool like Thunderbird still using the same layout it had 5 years ago, if that layout works well.…

I find the opposite to be true.

Apple Mail and Thunderbird give me a lot of false positives, and usually leave spam right in my inbox. Google—whom I'd assume look at what other users do with an email to figure out what's spam—always manage to filter out unwanted mail and keep legit emails in my inbox.

Both Apple Mail and Thunderbird are so dumb that they can't figure out I don't speak Chinese, and even after I mark 100 emails in Chinese as spam and have written 0 emails in Chinese since I've installed the apps, they happily fail to recognise emails in Chinese as spam and let them through.

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

#142

Post by dotancohen »

Certhas wrote: post #119
Silhouette wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't immediately understand is why they can't just fork Gecko and continue using it for their own purposes. Apparently the needs of Firefox and Thunderbird have diverged, and Mozilla seem to have little interest in supporting Thunderbird any more, so is it a crazy idea to just separate the projects completely and avoid the whole issue indefinitely? Changing the UIs within this particular family of software pr…

As a result of this thread I have tried the Nylas mail client which has a javascript UI, and I am very pleasantly surprised by just how smooth the UI is. Honestly, if I could use it without a Nylas account I would very seriously consider it as a Thunderbird replacement. From reading the original email thread it also looks like the Thunderbird guys are paying attention to Nylas.

VSCode and Slack are two other Electron apps with snappy UIs. Though I commend the devs on their snappy UIs, both those apps churn the CPUs and consume crazy amounts of memory. They absolutely kill the battery on laptops and make other applications unusable.

I do not want my mail client or any other app that should be always running in the background to be written in Electron.

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

#143

Post by nkkollaw »

krzyk wrote: post #135
nkkollaw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe with web standards (maybe, I'm not sure), but not the rest. Just the fact that the address bar font is the same size as the rest of the UI gives me the impression that they didn't think it through. Downloading files has the same problem, it's relegated in a small button, while it's one of the main features. The whole interface is one of the most unintuitive things I've ever used, considering how simple a browse…

> Syncing of bookmarks, settings, addons, passwords, tabs across devices etc. on Firefox is a lot less efficient. Anything to back that up? I'm pretty happy with Firefox syncing. I tried to switch to Chrome but it used a lot more memory than Firefox (and it was in days when Firefox was know for using much memory, Chrome somehow was able to get ahead on that also).

I'm only speaking from experience.

One thing would be that with Chrome I can login with my username and password, and I get all my extensions synced the first time I install it or I'm on a friend's computer, while with Firefox I have to wait for their confirmation email, click on it, then wait for it to sync.

You might argue that Firefox's approach is more secure, but every single website in existence is fine with my username and password—including online banking—and I think Firefox is the only software that make me do that extra step.

It's the little things, Firefox just seems to not care about my time. Too many buttons that I'm supposed to hide myself while they should've known no one uses them, too many steps to get to that setting, etc. etc.

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

#144

Post by rhizome »

geodel wrote: post #46
pjmlp wrote: post #5

If it becomes yet another Electron package it is time to look elsewhere.

Perhaps the idea to implement it as web technology is to leverage NPM so that millions of plugins can be made available to an email client.

Now you have 100,000 problems.

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

#145

Post by jodrellblank »

5ilv3r wrote: post #13

Mozilla just doesn't get the message.... We don't want your features, fixes, refreshes, rebranding, or re-imagining. We want a browser that is fast, stable, secure, minimal, and that DOES NOT FIGHT US. Let me load my old SSL certs (a warning is fine). Let me keep my preferences (why does https:// disappear from my address bar every update, and my search bar keep switching back to case sensitive). Stop making your pro…

Completely agree. "You don't need to see any of this, you can't go there for your own good" is frustrating and unhelpful.

I keep FireFox portable 3.x around for sites (intranet devices) like that.

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

#146

Post by Silhouette »

nkkollaw wrote: post #139
Silhouette wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a toolbar with 100 buttons of the same size: "Write, Chat, Reply, Reply all, Archive, Address book, Get email, Tag, Quick filter". My main Thunderbird toolbar has get mail, write new message and quick filtering. It took me perhaps 10 seconds back when I first installed it on this computer to hide a couple of other buttons like chat that I don't use myself. The second toolbar when I have a message open has jus…

> My main Thunderbird toolbar has get mail, write new message and quick filtering. It took me perhaps 10 seconds back when I first installed it on this computer to hide a couple of other buttons like chat that I don't use myself. That's not how it works. The authors have to take the time to study the situation, talk about it, make hard decisions and cut out features that are useless or barely useful, and have the bal…

The authors have to take the time to study the situation, talk about it, make hard decisions and cut out features that are useless or barely useful, and have the balls to ship a product with just the right features instead of all the features in an attempt to please everyone. Not the user.

You're perfectly entitled to that view, and for someone who holds that view a product like Thunderbird is obviously not a good fit.

There are, however, other views, and for someone who doesn't want simple UIs with no flexibility or configurability and doesn't have a problem with spending a few seconds customising something to get a result they are happier with, a product more like Thunderbird is a better fit.

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

#147

Post by buovjaga »

nkkollaw wrote: post #60

They've already neglected Thunderbird for years, and now they want to start from scratch? Doesn't sound like a good idea. Sounds more like another project they will shut down after a while. I used to use both Thunderbird and Firefox a few years ago as my main mail client and browser. Since then, Mozilla started spreading between too many projects, chasing the failed phone thing, and both Firefox and even worse Thunde…

> They've already neglected Thunderbird for years, and now they want to start from scratch?

If by "they" you are referring to Mozilla: they will not be involved in the rewrite.

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

#149

Post by Silhouette »

nkkollaw wrote: post #141
Silhouette wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you prefer the more "modern" style of relying on Google's online services and Chrome's frequent updates. That's fine, but it's not an objective standard. For example, some of us consider a UI that doesn't keep moving around every few weeks to be a feature, not a bug. I have absolutely no problem with a practical tool like Thunderbird still using the same layout it had 5 years ago, if that layout works well.…

I find the opposite to be true. Apple Mail and Thunderbird give me a lot of false positives, and usually leave spam right in my inbox. Google—whom I'd assume look at what other users do with an email to figure out what's spam—always manage to filter out unwanted mail and keep legit emails in my inbox. Both Apple Mail and Thunderbird are so dumb that they can't figure out I don't speak Chinese, and even after I mark 1…

Google—whom I'd assume look at what other users do with an email to figure out what's spam—always manage to filter out unwanted mail and keep legit emails in my inbox.

Unfortunately, your personal experience doesn't change the fact that Google do classify significant amounts of legitimate mail as spam. It appears that at some point in the somewhat recent past, they may have decided that literally anything new sent from a domain without SPF set up is spam, for example. That is simply broken, but they appear to have excessive spam filtering in other respects as well. We even see things like payment confirmation emails, which we are legally required to send and our customers might actually need, and which are basically factual plain text and a very lightly styled HTML version, getting rejected at times.

Personally, I'd rather a few false negatives hit my inbox and click the junk icon for a moment to deal with them than actually important things get lost in junk and opportunities missed as a result. I honestly have lost count of how many times I've seen that happen recently, but it's a lot, and it's almost invariably been a result of excessive spam controls by Google and one or two other big mail services.

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

#150

Post by zmix »

I'd rather see projects like Cyberfox, Thunderbird, Palemoon and Evolus Pencil (which, sadly, has been rewritten by now) taking up xulrunner, fork it and continue developing it.

I have yet to find a better system for rapid application development. XUL is wonderful, extentable, everybody know CSS and Javascript these days, XML is very well suited for such tasks. It's one of the best technologies for power-users I ever came around!

All that was ever needed would habe been a Mozilla, that creates an XUL IDE, rather than taking up on a lot of stupid projects (Persona Light Themes, Hello Chat, FirefoxOS, removing XPFE (how coding with XUL is actually called) and whatever (the only real good thing to mention would be Ubiquity, but they killed that off as well), oh, and let's not start talking about Firefoxy mugs, t-shirts, community barbecues, community videos... But hey, that's what happened.

Now, if some people would just fork xulrunner and mirrror the addons.mozilla.org stuff...

As for Thunderbird, I am also pretty satisfied as it is. It may be nice, if one could set certain To: email-addresses per folder (mailing-list folders would greatly benefit from that, along with subscribe/unsubscribe configured per such folder), alternate views onto mails and have, maybe, a modernized foldering-system.

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