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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#441

Post by ilyt »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #322
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…

I moved from claws-mail (because O365 now requires oauth and non-thunderbird experience with it is absolutely fucking awful) and it is noticeable slower. Not enough to call it "slow" tho, it is pretty snappy

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#442

Post by WalterBright »

wankle wrote: post #350
WalterBright wrote: post #339

My complaint is it should store each email in its own file (like NNTP readers do). This makes it much more amenable to backups, search, and makes it a lot less susceptible to corruption. Instead, Tbird stores one folder in one gigantic file. One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. Yes, I filed bug reports. No, it was never fixed (at least the Tbird developers denied this was a problem)…

> One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. In all the years I've used Thunderbird, it's never happened to me, several machine types. I like the way the file/folder structure is and do not want to see it changed.

You'll change your mind about liking it when it fails and you lose months/years of mail.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#443

Post by ilyt »

petre wrote: post #388
dhdgrygev wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox. The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liabil…

>You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.

I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up

> The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

You can set it to maildir style, sadly impossible after account creation and requires unbelievably much effort for such simple change.

Like, this piece of shit asked me to restart client to change IMAP server name, who wrote that garbage?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#444

Post by ilyt »

chefandy wrote: post #397
orbital223 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

If they focused instead on speed, and somehow managed to keep old plugins compatible, yes.

People moved to Chrome coz it was plainly faster and those who stayed did it for the various plugins they got used to. When new version of FF blows up your workflow might as well go try Chrome. Hell, I'd be using Chrome already if it had sensible vertical tabs implementation... the FF ones after the apocalypse are worse than XUL ones but still better than I've seen on Chrome.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#445

Post by ilyt »

HNAbusesUsers wrote: post #332
GordonS wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine? My issues were: - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing featur…

How does it "not support" Office365? No Exchange support? Condolences on having to use O365, BTW.

Probably talking about

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/owl-f...

which is paid.

Can achieve feature parity with plain IMAP + TbSync but that's another 3rd party addon.

So "doesn't work out of the box with o365" isn't that big of a stretch, plain TB will only get you IMAP working.

That's honestly more of MS being cancer and not using standards than anything else.

They also introduced required OAUTH2 authentication last year and in a way that you need essentially org admin rights to give any other client than TB access... because you need to create fucking app in MS panels that then gets used by mail client to authorize you. It is entirely aisine platform

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#446

Post by ilyt »

iillexial wrote: post #107
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #34

> Why does Thunderbird look so old UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.

It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.

I don't love light gray on white just because comment got some downvotes. Finding that you got answer to your comment is also PITA, especially if it is something older than "right now".

Old reddit + RES is entirely better in every regard. New reddit is utter garbage tho.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#447

Post by Guereric »

andix wrote: post #251
iillexial wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.

HN is really bad on touch devices. Call me young and naive, but I mostly read HN on the couch on my tablet.

I use Hckrnews.com, which is convenient on my phone and allows me to filter posts in order to be focused with my time.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#448

Post by mulmen »

jraph wrote: post #292
mulmen wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My home needs to be pretty because fundamentally I am an irrational animal motivated by my emotions. When I sit on my leather couch and look at my house plants and art that makes me feel good . When I come home and find things out of place it makes me feel bad . A UI revamp is like coming home to a crime scene, or at least a messy kitchen.

Likewise, for many people, pretty tools make them feel better. Of course, a UI revamp needs to be done carefully, taking existing users in account. If done well, it will be like someone living in the same home having done some cleaning. Otherwise I agree, it's not good.

Pretty tools don't make me feel better. Useful tools help me do work, and finishing work makes me feel better. I have suffered at the hands of many a meddling UX designer over the years. The best tools I ever used personally were Perl CGI scripts with no styling at all. Just fast page loads and buttons that do what I need.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#449

Post by dreamcompiler »

newscracker wrote: post #382
dreamcompiler wrote: post #373

I hope the Thunderbird crew understand how incredibly important this software is and how much some of us depend on it. Good IMAP clients are hard to write and most civilians have become so used to crappy browser-based email that there's not much demand for IMAP clients except among people like the ones who frequent this website. Apple ruined their IMAP client ("Mail") a few years ago so now that world is basically Ou…

> Apple ruined their IMAP client ("Mail") a few years ago Please elaborate on this point. I’d like to know how it was before and how it is now. > so now that world is basically Outlook and Thunderbird, and I'm sure I don't need to describe why Outlook is unacceptable. Please also elaborate on why Outlook is unacceptable. I like hearing different perspectives. I personally don’t use Outlook and don’t like it because i…

My problems with Apple Mail are twofold, and both happened in the last five years.

1. They changed the tabular UI in Mail such that the columns were no longer directly manipulable. For a while they had a setting that allowed you to continue to use the old UI, but that switch is now gone. The new UI is decidedly less functional for me. It reeks of "product manager urination syndrome" where a PM makes his mark by pissing on a good product and ruining it.

2. They introduced a bug that caused data loss on the IMAP server. An email client that destroys data on the server is a dealbreaker for me. I get the impression this has since been fixed, but Apple lost my trust with this one. I switched to Thunderbird.

As for Outlook, you expressed the issues better than I could.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#450

Post by powerpin9 »

account42 wrote: post #412
chefandy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

A common sentiment (which I share) is that Firefox has less and less to distiguish itself from Chrome(ium). Along with compatibility issues (even if they are rare and not Firefox's fault) there is less and less reason to choose it. Being as good as Chrome is not good enough to maintain users when Google is agressively pushing their browser in ways that Mozilla simply can't. So why would anyone use Firefox over chrome…

I use firefox on Linux for a pragmatic reason actually: it has a better font rendering than Chrom(ium). On my 4K screen I've started to notice that, with all the fixes for it to work right on Wayland, the fonts are still somewhat blurry. I googled and apparently some experts say that Chrome breaks some font rendering rules, on linux. On Windows I guess it isn't an issue since people wound surely notice.
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