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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#321

Post by ziftface »

bawolff wrote: post #246
throw0101a wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.) Getting ne…

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true, but i think its overstated. To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become the off-brand version of whoever is the marke…

The layout I expect Thunderbird to move towards is the one in every mail client I've used in the past decade, I wouldn't call that trendy. At this point you're an outlier so you better have a good reason to stick to the different UI.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#322

Post by dhdgrygev »

formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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…

I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.

For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings.

Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that parts of the window sometimes flash for seemingly no reason when it is left open for a while.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#323

Post by Samis2001 »

alerighi wrote: post #320
jraph wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what? Nothing needs to be pretty. Why stop at work tools? A home is there to let you cook, sleep and live efficiently. No need to be pretty. A city is there to allow you to go from A to B without any fuzz and to provide the essential services. Pretty cities are annoying. I have several accounts and thousands of mails. But I can't see how an efficient tool can't be pretty and how a pretty tool can't be effici…

> But I can't see how an efficient tool can't be pretty and how a pretty tool can't be efficient. Usually pretty and efficient doesn't go well together. Pretty tools not only add useless things (such as animation, transparency, etc) that are not functional but consume resources, but also are designed towards looking good without thinking at the usability of the tool, for example a lot of whitespace and padding, big l…

In the case of houses, I would think in most cases there's less conflict between prettiness and efficiency, for things like furniture there's much less space for the aesthetics to make a given piece more or less functional or efficient. However the tension isn't entirely gone, Juicero and 'McMansions' spring to mind as possible counterexamples.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#324

Post by wackget »

carlosjobim wrote: post #154

For a long time I wished for an e-mail client that shows a side-by-side view of the e-mail your composing and the e-mail you're replying to. I think the majority of people would like such a view, yet nobody offers it. Does anybody know any good solution in macOS?

You could just open a copy of the email in a separate window and tile them side-by-side.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#325

Post by paulrouget »

imiric wrote: post #203

I'll add one more negative sentiment. > Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point. No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"? The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional b…

Ex Mozilla here.

> Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"?

I'm not saying using Firefox is the best thing, but there are arguments to be made: first, Firefox is multiplatform, and good at it, and that's something Thunderbird needs as well. Then, like you said, an email client needs to display web pages, so no matter what, a web engine is needed (and it's absolutely possible to re-use Firefox core without building and including all the HTML features regular Firefox comes with). And finally, the whole TB code base is already in JS/XPCom, which would make the transition much easier.

> Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use

That's an unnecessary snarky. There are millions of reasons why it made sense to remove XUL. Yes, on paper XUL is great, but it was based on old UI ideas, we had to make tons of hacks to work around those old ideas, and performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve. XBL was way to limited, and tons of features were just useless (remember RDF and templates?).

I would love to see XUL come back, but we need a modern version of it, and to be honest, this could just be an extension of HTML.

> without sharing any of their core dependencies

That's not true.

> I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird

It's not Mozilla-Mozilla who's maintaining Thunderbird, but another entity.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#326

Post by NoboruWataya »

I have been using Thunderbird for years. Every now and again I get curious about what else is out there and I start looking into alternatives like Claws or Neomutt. But then inevitably I realise that these are simply solutions in search of a problem for me, that Thunderbird continues to work absolutely fine and there is really no reason to switch. I understand others will have a different use case to me but it always blows my mind to see people having so many problems with Thunderbird when it has been just a very consistent workhorse in my experience.

I use Thunderbird for personal stuff and Outlook for work. I know it's probably not a fair comparison as my work laptop is slowed down by all the security stuff and general corporate spyware, but damn I only wish my work email could be half as snappy as my personal email.

A tip for those complaining about search, particularly about its performance: if you can, try filtering instead. It's more limited (I think it only searches sender and subject line) but it is blazingly fast for me, filtering out several GB of emails in less than a second, always.

Finally, for those wondering why an email client needs to be built on top of a web browser - this is because in 2023, most "normies" receive a lot of email that is heavy on HTML, so in order to be in any way useful to the majority of users, an email client needs to be really good at parsing HTML, which browsers are. Of course it seems like overkill if you only receive plaintext email.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#327

Post by pfp »

Karellen wrote: post #71
mr_machine wrote: post #54

I've used Thunderbird exclusively for desktop mail for many years. To my knowledge, it still sucks less than any other free and open option, but that's not much of a bar. Over time, Thunderbird has become slower and less reliable, most notably in the area of search. While the advanced search tools are excellent, the results are lousy. Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index…

> To my knowledge, [Thunderbird] still sucks less than any other free and open option, Have you tried Claws Mail? It's a plain native traditional email client, and I find it really snappy. There is even a Windows port. Not sure how "native" people might consider that as it's still based on GTK for Windows, and I don't have personal experience with it, but might be worth giving a try? https://www.claws-mail.org/downlo…

Holy crap, this is amazing.

I had already lost hope of finding a civilized email client. This is what all software should look like.

Thank you.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#328

Post by HNAbusesUsers »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #326

I have been using Thunderbird for years. Every now and again I get curious about what else is out there and I start looking into alternatives like Claws or Neomutt. But then inevitably I realise that these are simply solutions in search of a problem for me, that Thunderbird continues to work absolutely fine and there is really no reason to switch. I understand others will have a different use case to me but it always…

After getting my parents new computers, setting them up from scratch, and finding that Windows is an even more depressing shitshow than ever and lacking any competent E-mail program... I installed Thunderbird for the first time in at least a decade and a half.

And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's better than I remember, and worked great for the 20,000 messages or so in each of their AOL In boxes. Sadly, I'm not kidding about those In boxes.

For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#329

Post by orbital223 »

throw0101a wrote: post #195
tux3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the…

> That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.) Getting ne…

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#330

Post by notpushkin »

mmcgaha wrote: post #261
yamtaddle wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood? When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.

I have never used thunderbird but I am sure a lot changed when when xul went away.

XUL is still there. Even in Firefox, the UI is still powered by XUL – it's just not exposed to addons anymore: https://u.ale.sh/there-is-only-xul.png
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