21–30 of 473 posts
I do hope the redesign considers add-on developers. A lot have been abandoned by their maintainers who become frustrated with keeping up with Thunderbird's changes. One thing I'd love to see is an easy way to send money to support add-on creators.
It's probably the worst of all email clients we've tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can't find emails when searching for a name. It's so bad.
There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).
Is there a capable alternative to Microsoft's Outlook client, that has good translation of emails built in? This is for Windows.
Outlook is so slow, and it opens a small side pane for translation. It has a horrible UI.
> …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience.
Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" really never stops giving.
You don't actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workforce -- someone has to coordinate all that, or else what you're going to get is a mess, both under the hood and in what is visible. And coordinating all that is hard and resource-intensive, the more so the _more_ developers involved.
Some open source projects manage to do that coordination with a decentralized volunteer coordinating staff (although in many cases, it's not truly "volunteer", it's people being paid by various employers collaborating across organizations/employers -- this was in fact most of original open source success stories). But it's not easy. And requires stability and tenure in that decentralized coordinating staff, to hold the vision, and to have the relationships to work together in a unified way. (A "benevolent dictator" is another way to do it).
The hardest part of developing software that is too much for one person to do by themselves (and that one person never leaves), is always the inter-personal communication, coordination, and shared-mental-model-making-and-sharing, not the coding.
So anyway, without being involved in Thunderbird at all, I totally believe this story, and that bringing it back into an organization of paid employees as a core was necessary to prevent complete disintegration (I mean, other organizational solutions are possible too, but they are all even more challenging, this is the simplest), because... that's how it works.
Apple Mail on OSX 10.4 (originally NeXT) working well today fyi the industrial strength, bullet proof, complex but profoundly reliable engineering within Apple Mail shows itself to have stability over decades. Why is this Thunderbird rewrite going to succeed ? A glossy sales pitch makes it less convincing, not more. This is a years' long project with no guranteed outcomes.. in fact, I would suspect that noveau securi…
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit
Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.
> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's liter…
The main issue with Thunderbird IMO is that line-wrapping and quoting (and especially their interaction) during composition is horrifically buggy!
But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102).
Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.