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Thunderbird 115

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Re: Thunderbird 115

#291

Post by bhauer »

Keegs wrote: post #246
andix wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information density can be very overwhelming and a factor for stress. Often a lower density is totally enough and less stressful to use. Providing an optional "compact mode" for people with smaller screens or who prefer denser layouts would be my way to go.

I’m interested to know where this idea comes from. Is there a good reference you recommend? My anecdotal experience has been that low density websites like Medium are more stressful than higher density websites like Substack/HN because I have to do more work to read the text on the page.

I agree with you. Low-density desktop applications cause me more unease because there's more need to scroll to make sure I didn't miss something. It's especially egregious when the designers make the scrollbars invisible (appearing only on hover or use), meaning there's often no indication of more content available via scrolling. It breeds the habit of ritualistically scrolling each pane to make sure you're not missing something.

There's something psychological about the appearance of a low-density display as well. I can't quite explain it, but it causes me a bit of displeasure because it feels wasteful. There are so many pixels available but they aren't doing anything for me. I don't know why this causes me discomfort, but it does.

Finally, it's important for an application like a mail client to not lose sight of the fact that the way people use email varies. I personally use dozens of folders, meaning the density of the folder list should be as compact as reasonably possible so that I don't need to scroll.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#293

Post by bhauer »

thesausageking wrote: post #287

Side note: does anyone know why it costs so much to make a donation? I'm an avid Thunderbird user and I like to support the team making it, but drives me crazy that sending them money costs 8%. So if you give them $100, they only get $92. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ I know Mozilla is anti-crypto, but there still has to be a cheaper way to send them money.

For whatever it's worth, you can also donate via mailed check, assuming you're in the US. This will avoid the 8% card processing fee.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#296

Post by nulld3v »

mistercheph wrote: post #129
Otek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not sure why this metric is important when you can get 1tb pen drive for $100

Oh, then surely you can send him the $100 right quick to grab it? The hundo is no biggie, right?

Correction: you can get a 1TB SSD for under $100. It's more like $50 these days.

You can get 1TB USBs and hard drives for far less (e.g. $10 used).

Re: Thunderbird 115

#297

Post by aorth »

Long time Thunderbird user. Love it, donate monthly, open source is important, blah blah blah. Having said that, does anyone else notice how the text editor in the email message body has a bunch of weird issues?

For example, edit a previously sent email with a list, and in the new message every list has a space at the end of each element. Try to delete the space and it deletes the last character. You have to use shift-arrow to select the space and delete it. What is that?!

Another example, sometimes I paste from a rich-text source that has a table and it immediately converts the body to plaintext or something awful. Can't Ctrl-Z to undo, and I've already written a bunch of text that I don't want to lose, so I copy my text and paste into something plaintext and start the message over.

In general I avoid pasting into the message body because of these type of weird issues. What component is that? I haven't gotten around to filing a bug yet because I've never tried to explain these issues to anyone else before!

Re: Thunderbird 115

#298

Post by JohnFen »

elric wrote: post #89
orra wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just jumping in to say I'm also incredibly happy to see this change (and the other expected improvements). Thunderbird currently looks dated, and I'm glad to see it brought into the 2020s. Sometimes current users can be dismissive of UI changes, so it's good to see fellow users who are happy. Moreover, let's not forget the new users, who were previously put off by the dated UI.

I guess I'll be that dismissive current user. I don't like random UI changes in a tool I use as frequently as a mail client. The new icons don't look too bad, even if I dislike their flat nature. I don't think TB looks dated. It looks functional. Which is exactly what I want from a mail client. If I want something that looks modern but is dysfunctional, I'll just switch to Outlook.

> I don't think TB looks dated. It looks functional. Which is exactly what I want from a mail client.

This.

For better or worse, I've rather come to view "modern" flashy UI aesthetics as being indicative of poorly performing software. It's not fair, I recognize, but in my personal experience, it's a reasonable heuristic.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#299

Post by JohnFen »

precompute wrote: post #190
andix wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information density can be very overwhelming and a factor for stress. Often a lower density is totally enough and less stressful to use. Providing an optional "compact mode" for people with smaller screens or who prefer denser layouts would be my way to go.

> Information density can be very overwhelming and a factor for stress. Really? And what about tiny scrollbars?

Tiny scrollbars drive me nuts. But they're not nearly as annoying as almost nonexistent window frames!

Re: Thunderbird 115

#300

Post by JohnFen »

pmontra wrote: post #181
folkrav wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also IMAP and webmail but POP3 is better for my use case. I'm curious as to why, if you don't mind! Are you specifically looking for "download only once then get rid of it"?

Yes, see my reply to the other message. My mail stays on my computer, backed up locally and encrypted to a remote location. I lose the ability to access old messages from remote but it never was a problem in almost 17 years of self employment. Before that, I already had about 13 years of downloaded emails, from the times when web mail was not a thing. No need to upload my old messages to Gmail, if this is even possib…

Yes, before I ran my own mailserver, I strongly preferred POP3 for this reason -- it let me get my email off of a server that I had no control over and onto a machine that I do have control over.

But after I started running my own server, I prefer IMAP so that all of my email is in one place regardless of what machine I'm using. And it still lives on a machine that I have control over.

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