Presumably the column with the list of emails in the currently selected inbox. (2nd column from left.)
Some email clients have multiple rows of information in that column - the first row might have name & subject, the next row might show the first two sentences of the email. Or it might have the subject on a separate line, so the column can be kept narrow but still show the full subject line.
Think of the iOS Mail or Android GMail interfaces, for example.
I am pretty sure we could come up with something like a switch in the option.
It's not doable with CSS only anyway, so it won't happen if they just design a new theme on the current XUL toolkit (correct me if anything changed about that lately).
There's a sane responsive interface solution to that: you get single-line layout on wide screen, and a compact multi-line layout on narrow screen. Answering a nearby comment, it's doable in CSS-only[1].
This entire discussion is not about complex interface design and the lack of technical solutions, but the stagnating product. And about questionable actions to give it a peppy appearance.
Have you tried https://www.postbox-inc.com/ ? It's a commercial version of thunderbird from an older thunderbird core dev and it comes with multiple lines. And other niceties. $40 with volume discounts.
Sounds awesome! I'm pretty happy with Thunderbird as is, but a modern interface potentially means more users... and hopefully as a result, a longer life.
Those survey questions are completely irrelevant to interface design. I use TB every day as my main private mail client and the picture they show me doesn't even look like what I use. Then they ask a bunch of marketing BS questions that have absolutely nothing to do with usability.
I hope these people stay the hell away from my favorite mail client.
I have to agree that the questions could have been better. For instance, they asked "Does this interface look trustworthy". What does that even mean?
I believe it's trustworthy because it's open source and backed by Mozilla. The only aspect of the interface that would lead me not to trust it is advertisements.
That being said, with good luck they'll get more useful feedback to the open-ended questions.
Generally not, but in this case I do. The proposed redesign[1] is essentially the same layout, but with a fancy theming. It's good practice not to break the familiar interface, but there's a lot to improve in terms of UI/UX in Thunderbird. For example:
a) presented vertical layout is the same as it is today—you need to have a really high resolution (1080p+) widescreen to fit the entire window. Messages section could have rows with multi-line inlined metadata, thus be significantly narrowed[2];
b) threaded messages feed (or so called conversations) on the same screenshot is presented too vaguely for such an important feature, I bet I'll still have to jump between Sent/Inbox folders in 2018+...;
c) replying to/composing a message is impossible to do in tabs[3] (10 years old), you have to manage separate windows. And there's nothing on this matter in current redesign proposal;
d) not a single word/screenshot on calendar/todo-lists management; etc.
Simply put, this is not the way to redesign such an important large application. Has there been any work done on analyzing user/task scenarios [4]? Any research was conducted on modern best practices? Instead of presenting a list with UI/UX features breakdown and several well-thought solutions, we're supposed to vote on "does it look exciting/professional?" beneath a single 800×500px screenshot. Answering the question: no, it doesn't. It's the very same application, hence stagnant. Do not take offense at the words about "stagnating product", this is what it is.
Much more important than shiny new UI, what I'd like to see is seamless out-of-the-box syncing with online calendars and contacts. (At one point, I tried all the available add-ons for syncing with Google's apps; none of those add-ons worked well for me.)
This a thousand times. Thunderbird would have been great if it calendared well with exchange. As it stands, the available support is garbage and barely works when it works at all.
Importantly, since this is a Mozilla project, that service should be self-hostable [1] to disintermediate the multi-device synchronization platform. It should not be necessary to have a third-party observe all my contacts and calendars.
If Mozilla ever were to offer a paid calendar-and-contacts online service, powered by open-source code, and backed with strong customer/data/privacy protections, I would sign up.
No need for Mozilla to make server software for this; Thunderbird/Lightning do CalDav and CardDav just fine, right? Seems that cs702's problem isn't with Thunderbird, it's with Google supporting CalDav and CardDav for sync.
If you want to self host, just host any CalDav or CardDav server software.
Thunderbird does not support carddav. Contacts + Thunderbird is generally a terrible experience. I switched to Zoho’s webmail because of this (at least I can get bidirectional sync to my iPhone).
Since this is a mozilla project it should buy a proprietary service for an undisclosed amount of money and force it down the throat of everybody with no option to self host (pocket).
And this should happen to avoid using an already available open source project that works well and you can self host (wallabag).
I get that it's the modern style, but would it be so terrible to add some colour? The left hand pane has colours, so why can't the buttons?
The menu buttons is really what make Thunderbird weird to me. The "write" button has a drop-down that say Message, Event, and Task... So write an event? They also never seems to line up, nor do they actually look like button. Sadly non of this is addressed in the presented design.
A redesign is a great symbolic move to fight "Thunderbird’s key problem is being perceived as either dead or stagnant".
Still, Thunderbird needs a bigger vision. What does Thunderbird want to be? The cross-platform Outlook? Then merge Lightning into core. The native Gmail? Then get a conversations view. The backwards-compatible, easy, and secure mailer? Then merge Enigmail into core or make SMIME easy to use or get some Rust code in. The ultra-portable mailer? Then port it to Android and iOS. The super-flexible mailer? Then somehow help plugin devs.
"Thunderbird’s key problem is being perceived as either dead or stagnant"
Some of us spell that "stable and reliable" and consider it the single most important property of our essential day-to-day software. If it ain't broke...
I'd say the difference between dead and stable is if you encounter bugs all the time. I find Thunderbird stable (only triggers a bug roughly once per month and nothing critical) while the Lightning plugin for calender functionality is dead (fails to sync with Google for months).
FWIW, I do use Lightning all the time and only know of a couple of minor UI bugs, and at least one other person in my house uses it to sync with external calendars routinely without serious problems as well, so if there are serious bugs there then they don't seem to be universal. In any case, I'd much rather fixing this sort of thing was the priority for the project than yet another UI theme overhaul because reasons.
The order in which you install add-ons, such as the provider for Google calendar and Exchange calendar support, matters. I've spent too long jiggering with add-ons to get them to play nicely together.
Once I have a functioning setup,I copy the profile wholesale from machine to machine. I use Thunderbird every day and have done for years.
I consider that a local problem that only you have. None of the several person using TB daily for more than a decade have encountered this kind of performance issue.
What have you tried to find the cause of your performance issue ? Have you tried making a new user profile to test if your local profile got somehow corrupted ?
Yes, I've tried many things, including a new profile. Compacting would help for a few days. Thunderbird just doesn't seem to do well with large mail archives going back more than a decade. That is my experience and the experience of others.
Also, I've met many people who experience similar performance issues, so I find it bothersome that because you've never encountered it you're asserting it does not exist.
This is also an issue that's span multiple machines and multiple clean installs.
Add me to your new list then. TB starts up in ~1min. Sometimes it will just hang for a few minutes while updating emails/calendar. (Can't switch to its window) Sometimes it will take 10s+ to dismiss a meeting reminder. Sometimes the meeting reminder can't be dismissed. Sometimes it will get confused by filters working slowly and both beep for a new message and then immediately move it away.
There are bugs upstream for all of those. They're up there for years.
I am using TB as my mail client and there are so many things that work. Almost. So many things to configure, but not in the way that I feel would be natural.
TB is mostly worse than Outlook, but still much better than most other clients.
Thunderbird's problem, i think, is that their userbase contains a large portion of people who value thunderbird for it's stagnancy, but at the same time get angry if you suggest that thunderbird might be stagnant.
Thunderbird is the email client for people who want email to work exactly like it did ten years ago. that's their value-add, and it really should be their vision.
I think one thing that maybe kept ThB from innovating was that people took webmail to heart. It's few people who want a thick client or even want to go thru the config. What port, what server, etc.
On a mobile device, the UI walks them through the scenarios (Google, Microsoft, etc) so they usually don't have to guess or have "IT" set it up for them.
Plus, what ships with MAC and Windows is good enough for most people who do want some kind of thick client.
Regardless, ThB was the ugly child at Mozilla since ever. They should have taken the Opp when Eudora was finally killed, but I don't think Moz had the energy.
> Plus, what ships with MAC and Windows is good enough for most people who do want some kind of thick client.
Airmail and Spark, among others, would like to have a word with you. Airmail in particular started out as a Mac client before being ported to iOS. There exists quite a market for good email clients, I would think.
I think it means "does it look like an app that you would trust with your email workflow".
If the design looks broken or amateurish, maybe that would lead you to not trust the application because you feel it is poorly made and will lose your data one day.
Or maybe the new design is so focused on stickers & gifs* that you don't trust the application to reliably handle your professional business communications with clients anymore.
* (I'm looking at you, Skype, with this comment...)
I get it that Thunderbird looks unhip but I feel like the heavily padded lines waste too much space. The gmail "compact" setting is a much better compromise between space and legibility.
But unless they move Thunderbird to WebExtensions (which would be a total productivity disaster) it can always be modded.
Although an UI update is always welcome there are more important issues to address in Thunderbird, like better calendar synchronisation and an overhaul to its search capabilities.
Agreed. In my response to their survey, I pointed out that with a communication platform, information density is important. A design should not squander space (ala Slack) just to be hip.
I disagree that UI updates are always welcome. I subscribe to the "interfaces are not intuitive they are familiar" school of design. It may look dated and maybe it does need an update but I hope the motivation is to improve productivity and not just to be hip.
A sign of me being officially old: I like Thunderbird the way it is. Really. For what I want to do with it, it's just fine, so I'm rather scared of that potentially getting screwed up with a UI redesign.
There are some enhancements to functionality and some bug fixes that would be helpful in Thunderbird, and security fixes are always welcome. However, this is essential software that I rely on for serious work. It doesn't need to be flashy. It doesn't need a UI overhaul that shifts things around for no particular reason and almost certainly breaks things that matter. It just needs to work, reliably and unobtrusively, and not mess anything up.
It's pretty meh. It looks like a simple reskin of Thunderbird which doesn't solve any of its problems if you ask me. Thunderbird could certainly use some design love (a conversation view like Gmail could be neat), but I like TB beta's theme better than this.
They're cheating on the screenshots in the survey. The "current thunderbird" screenshot is taken at half the resolution (or twice the font size) of the "thunderbird redesign" screenshot, giving their redesign twice as much space with which to display the same information. Obviously it's going to look better with that advantage. I'm not sure exactly what it'd mean to "trust" a user interface, but I'm definitely sure I wouldn't trust any of that survey's data.
That's not the only trick they use. Note the choice of plaintext vs. HTML mail (even though current TB supports HTML just fine), interesting looking mail vs. mock-ups of bad spam, different screen aspect ratio, and of course the leading survey questions.
Note how the "tasks" list is cut off because it simply no longer fits the screen (where the current version has enough space to show it), missing UI elements in the new design (the entire quick filter bar, which would reduce the available space to 3 (!) e-mail headers), the harshly truncated and thus useless subject lines in the new design, the lack of the "this is a draft" toolbar in the new design, that was added to make the old one look more crowded.
Thunderbird is forgetting their target audience. I suspect that people who like shiny over features have long switched to web interfaces. The new design would take away what used to appeal to their remaining users.
The two interfaces are the same. The new one has more colors and smaller buttons. I'll trade larger buttons for the colors.
I'll trade everything for being able to see as many messages as I'll always did. Not another Skype like redesign with lots of useless white space around messages, thanks.
On my laptop the default whitespace is too much, as well. The white space is adjustable in userChrome.css, which, to my understanding from the instructions, you need to edit anyway.
As a heavy Thunderbird user, my biggest complaint is offline support. An IMAP sync will download new emails' subject lines, but not the actual message bodies. Clicking on an email subject line then requires freezes Thunderbird for multiple seconds while it downloads the message body for that single email.
Right click the account and go to Synchronization and Storage. Double check on individual folders. I know this works because my ImapMail folder (in the profile folder) is much bigger than it would be if it only had subjects, and a quick sampling shows full messages.
If you have this on and it's still taking seconds, the problem is probably coming from something else.
I would be very happy with Thunderbird if it continued functioning as it already does, but without opening up a desktop notification listing emails I received 2 weeks ago... emails it notified me were new every time I clicked on the application and then off of it for the past 2 weeks. I have yet to figure out the logic behind what messages it chooses to show there.
I don't really care either way about the colors and the fonts. I care more about functionality, and the current version still has a very annoying bug, where there's a type of spam email that Thunderbird will choke on when trying to download it using POP. I have to use webmail to go manually delete the offending email so that Thunderbird can download the rest of the emails. Last time I investigated this, it seems that others have reported this problem, but nothing's been done about it. I'm very close to moving to Outlook now (which would also help with calendaring, but that's a whole other can of worms), and a simple re-design isn't what's going to keep me as a Thunderbird user.
My main problem with Thunderbird is that it's a poor citizen in email, particularly with regard to its handling of plaintext. It's far from alone in that respect, but I would really appeciate Thunderbird being a leader in taking the problem seriously.
Exactly. How about not losing scroll position when switching tabs? Better spam filtering? How come threaded view doesn't work for mails sent by Outlook? (I know we have Microsoft to blame for that, but a workaround should not be impossible to conceive since Outlook somehow manages that already.)
I suspect the people getting excited about a face-lift don't really use Thunderbird very often.
One has to be a coder, able to deal with the current state of code and the many changes to come, while having a load of free time to maintain the fork.
I mean my 90 years old grandma is a decade long thunderbird user and she absolutely unable to make thunderbird the way she wants. She is 100% dependent on mozilla's good will.
> This redesign is just playing around with colors, background images and minor visual adjustments to the message view. Nobody needs this.
Some UI components do need rework. Redundant search fields, password dialogs that fail to track the login state, etc.
It also strikes me as very odd that someone states that nobody needs UI work on a GUI app, particularly when GUI components make between 50% and 75% of thjs sort of app's code base
I have yet to recover from last time they reworked the UI, so it's not that obvious that a rework is needed or good.
I don't remember how long ago this UI rework happened that added opening email in a tab, but to this day I still get called because "something's wrong with the computer, I can't read my emails " and I just close the gajillions opened tabs in thunderbird to fix the issue.
It improved through time as a significant portion of my users' email moved from desktop to tablets.
Do yourself (and to other e-mail users in the hacker community) some good and use something like Mutt or Gnus. Sth. like Thunderbird is not worth the hassle if you can edit a configuration file and read a man page (most folk here, I'd guess), and who can't is using Gmail and/or the app on their phones anyways.
Why do so many geeks insist that markup is good for web documents but not for e-mail?
E-mails can benefit from headings, bulleted lists and tables just as much as a web page. It's all about communicating information in human-digestable format.
OR PERHAPS ALL EMAIL SHOULD BE SENT TELEGRAM STYLE WITHOUT PUNCTUATION SINCE THAT IS JUST A DISTRACTION STOP ALSO ONLY IN ASCII CAPS STOP
Well structured text is both readable and has a very long life as it is. There are prime examples at textfiles.com, eg. http://textfiles.com/magazines/LOD/lod-1
Am also a ham, so not completely opposed to increased take-up of CW. Particularly in a global HF mesh network.
I'm not actually opposed to markup at all, but you know exactly the kind of over-designed barf I'm talking about being happy not receiving. I can always open an email from a tmp file in the browser (by hitting <v> then <enter> in mutt) but in more than 9/10 cases that just isn't necessary. W3m renders an approximation of the html layout just fine.
IIRC you can use the browser to view them, i.e. a keystroke opens it in the browser. In Gnus I hit "K H" for that. Emacs also has SHR, a renderer for HTML, but it doesn't do all that good with complex documents.
I'm not sure how they'll get much use out of this one. They show (not very representative) screen shots and then ask broad questions, like "Would you say this design is rather confusing or clear?" and "Would you say this design is rather boring or inspiring?"
Setting aside that I don't understand why "rather" is in all of the questions, they're still not great. Is the design of a screwdriver inspiring? I guess not. Is that bad? Definitely not. I don't need my tools to be fonts of warm fuzzy feelings. I need them to be useful.
Even if the questions were material, asking it about a whole screenshot composed of many different design changes inevitably muddles things. And asking it only of 1 old and 1 new screenshot invites people to judge on novelty, not utility.
So my suspicion is that the survey isn't really testing any useful hypotheses. We know that some people like new shiny and some people like old familiar. I don't think much is gained here.
I've been through the survey and it is quite bad, the questions are purely marketing centered, trying to figure out the perceived image people have of the software based of a single screenshot.
Where are the question about usability and practicality ?
Said screenshots are from much different screen resolution so one is cluttered[1] and the other is illegible[2].
The whole survey gives the idea that the current design is bad and the new is better. I mean when you get asked to rate an old thing vs a new one on a scale between outdated and modern.
149 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadSome email clients have multiple rows of information in that column - the first row might have name & subject, the next row might show the first two sentences of the email. Or it might have the subject on a separate line, so the column can be kept narrow but still show the full subject line.
Think of the iOS Mail or Android GMail interfaces, for example.
Or outlook 2003 https://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/office/images/editions/... which was released like 15 years ago. I remember because I made an office 2003 theme for thunderbird. I am never touching that 1500 CSS files clusterfuck again.
It's not doable with CSS only anyway, so it won't happen if they just design a new theme on the current XUL toolkit (correct me if anything changed about that lately).
This entire discussion is not about complex interface design and the lack of technical solutions, but the stagnating product. And about questionable actions to give it a peppy appearance.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Media_Queri...
From what I gather it uses some of thunderbird and firefox code but is heavily modified and is proprietary software.
Too bad they decided to drop linux support, it renders it useless to me.
Reported: 15 years ago Modified: 28 days ago
How the years go by.
edit: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Thunderbird:2.0_Product_Planni... Users were talking about it for the 2.0 release.
Here's a quick link to the survey: https://thunderbird-design.typeform.com/to/f7wiiq?utm_referr...
I hope these people stay the hell away from my favorite mail client.
I believe it's trustworthy because it's open source and backed by Mozilla. The only aspect of the interface that would lead me not to trust it is advertisements.
That being said, with good luck they'll get more useful feedback to the open-ended questions.
a) presented vertical layout is the same as it is today—you need to have a really high resolution (1080p+) widescreen to fit the entire window. Messages section could have rows with multi-line inlined metadata, thus be significantly narrowed[2];
b) threaded messages feed (or so called conversations) on the same screenshot is presented too vaguely for such an important feature, I bet I'll still have to jump between Sent/Inbox folders in 2018+...;
c) replying to/composing a message is impossible to do in tabs[3] (10 years old), you have to manage separate windows. And there's nothing on this matter in current redesign proposal;
d) not a single word/screenshot on calendar/todo-lists management; etc.
Simply put, this is not the way to redesign such an important large application. Has there been any work done on analyzing user/task scenarios [4]? Any research was conducted on modern best practices? Instead of presenting a list with UI/UX features breakdown and several well-thought solutions, we're supposed to vote on "does it look exciting/professional?" beneath a single 800×500px screenshot. Answering the question: no, it doesn't. It's the very same application, hence stagnant. Do not take offense at the words about "stagnating product", this is what it is.
[1] https://twitter.com/omgubuntu/status/855035593289609216
[2] https://errorfixer.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/slow-mail-a...
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299
[4] https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/scenarios...
Much more important than shiny new UI, what I'd like to see is seamless out-of-the-box syncing with online calendars and contacts. (At one point, I tried all the available add-ons for syncing with Google's apps; none of those add-ons worked well for me.)
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/
If you want to self host, just host any CalDav or CardDav server software.
And this should happen to avoid using an already available open source project that works well and you can self host (wallabag).
See Cardav and Caldav.
The menu buttons is really what make Thunderbird weird to me. The "write" button has a drop-down that say Message, Event, and Task... So write an event? They also never seems to line up, nor do they actually look like button. Sadly non of this is addressed in the presented design.
Still, Thunderbird needs a bigger vision. What does Thunderbird want to be? The cross-platform Outlook? Then merge Lightning into core. The native Gmail? Then get a conversations view. The backwards-compatible, easy, and secure mailer? Then merge Enigmail into core or make SMIME easy to use or get some Rust code in. The ultra-portable mailer? Then port it to Android and iOS. The super-flexible mailer? Then somehow help plugin devs.
lol
Some of us spell that "stable and reliable" and consider it the single most important property of our essential day-to-day software. If it ain't broke...
Once I have a functioning setup,I copy the profile wholesale from machine to machine. I use Thunderbird every day and have done for years.
What have you tried to find the cause of your performance issue ? Have you tried making a new user profile to test if your local profile got somehow corrupted ?
Also, I've met many people who experience similar performance issues, so I find it bothersome that because you've never encountered it you're asserting it does not exist.
This is also an issue that's span multiple machines and multiple clean installs.
There are bugs upstream for all of those. They're up there for years.
I've had to find a non google replacement for firefox, I don't want to go through this again to replace thunderbird.
Thunderbird has had a ML/usenet-like conversations view forever.
I am using TB as my mail client and there are so many things that work. Almost. So many things to configure, but not in the way that I feel would be natural.
TB is mostly worse than Outlook, but still much better than most other clients.
Thunderbird is the email client for people who want email to work exactly like it did ten years ago. that's their value-add, and it really should be their vision.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con...
It resembles the old Gmail interface, and it's open source.
It seems to be a totally different thing than the regular message list, and only some actions work in Conversation mode.
Thunderbird will soon add support for webextensions, who knows what will happen of the legacy extensions further than short term ?
Stagnant is a negative characteristic. Keeping things that work the way they are isn't.
MSPaint hasn't been "stagnant" for decades, it was the way people liked it.
I think one thing that maybe kept ThB from innovating was that people took webmail to heart. It's few people who want a thick client or even want to go thru the config. What port, what server, etc.
On a mobile device, the UI walks them through the scenarios (Google, Microsoft, etc) so they usually don't have to guess or have "IT" set it up for them.
Plus, what ships with MAC and Windows is good enough for most people who do want some kind of thick client.
Regardless, ThB was the ugly child at Mozilla since ever. They should have taken the Opp when Eudora was finally killed, but I don't think Moz had the energy.
Airmail and Spark, among others, would like to have a word with you. Airmail in particular started out as a Mac client before being ported to iOS. There exists quite a market for good email clients, I would think.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
Maybe I misread it, but to me it sounded like Mozilla did not have Rust support in Thunderbird, but it seems that there is some already ...
1) Trusted identity assertion: I want to know with confidence (at a glance) that the sender is who I think they are.
2) Secure communication: I want the visual metaphor of email (private correspondence) to match the reality of email.
How great would it be if Mozilla lead the way to for email clients to adopt open standards to do easily do these things.
[1]: https://www.caliopen.org/en/
If the design looks broken or amateurish, maybe that would lead you to not trust the application because you feel it is poorly made and will lose your data one day.
Or maybe the new design is so focused on stickers & gifs* that you don't trust the application to reliably handle your professional business communications with clients anymore.
* (I'm looking at you, Skype, with this comment...)
The survey begs the following answer: the new redesign UI will give thunderbird a bigger market share.
But unless they move Thunderbird to WebExtensions (which would be a total productivity disaster) it can always be modded.
Although an UI update is always welcome there are more important issues to address in Thunderbird, like better calendar synchronisation and an overhaul to its search capabilities.
(obligatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/1172/)
There are some enhancements to functionality and some bug fixes that would be helpful in Thunderbird, and security fixes are always welcome. However, this is essential software that I rely on for serious work. It doesn't need to be flashy. It doesn't need a UI overhaul that shifts things around for no particular reason and almost certainly breaks things that matter. It just needs to work, reliably and unobtrusively, and not mess anything up.
I've created a "fairer" mockup (same resolution/size): https://i.imgur.com/wTLYTV6.png
Note how the "tasks" list is cut off because it simply no longer fits the screen (where the current version has enough space to show it), missing UI elements in the new design (the entire quick filter bar, which would reduce the available space to 3 (!) e-mail headers), the harshly truncated and thus useless subject lines in the new design, the lack of the "this is a draft" toolbar in the new design, that was added to make the old one look more crowded.
Thunderbird is forgetting their target audience. I suspect that people who like shiny over features have long switched to web interfaces. The new design would take away what used to appeal to their remaining users.
Hanlon's razor.
thunderbird has over 20 years lineage, and I've screenshots of the major stages at:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/
Has someone audited this for malware?
I'll trade everything for being able to see as many messages as I'll always did. Not another Skype like redesign with lots of useless white space around messages, thanks.
Compact spacing:
If you have this on and it's still taking seconds, the problem is probably coming from something else.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844
At the least do a pass over old bugs and let us know if they will ever be fixed, or close them.
I suspect the people getting excited about a face-lift don't really use Thunderbird very often.
I mean my 90 years old grandma is a decade long thunderbird user and she absolutely unable to make thunderbird the way she wants. She is 100% dependent on mozilla's good will.
I was hoping for a redesign of the UI, the ways you interact with your mails.
This is one of those „look, I played around in Illustrator“ things, not „I thought about the problem“.
Some UI components do need rework. Redundant search fields, password dialogs that fail to track the login state, etc.
It also strikes me as very odd that someone states that nobody needs UI work on a GUI app, particularly when GUI components make between 50% and 75% of thjs sort of app's code base
I don't remember how long ago this UI rework happened that added opening email in a tab, but to this day I still get called because "something's wrong with the computer, I can't read my emails " and I just close the gajillions opened tabs in thunderbird to fix the issue.
It improved through time as a significant portion of my users' email moved from desktop to tablets.
E-mails can benefit from headings, bulleted lists and tables just as much as a web page. It's all about communicating information in human-digestable format.
OR PERHAPS ALL EMAIL SHOULD BE SENT TELEGRAM STYLE WITHOUT PUNCTUATION SINCE THAT IS JUST A DISTRACTION STOP ALSO ONLY IN ASCII CAPS STOP
I'm not actually opposed to markup at all, but you know exactly the kind of over-designed barf I'm talking about being happy not receiving. I can always open an email from a tmp file in the browser (by hitting <v> then <enter> in mutt) but in more than 9/10 cases that just isn't necessary. W3m renders an approximation of the html layout just fine.
https://medium.com/research-things/on-surveys-5a73dda5e9a0
I'm not sure how they'll get much use out of this one. They show (not very representative) screen shots and then ask broad questions, like "Would you say this design is rather confusing or clear?" and "Would you say this design is rather boring or inspiring?"
Setting aside that I don't understand why "rather" is in all of the questions, they're still not great. Is the design of a screwdriver inspiring? I guess not. Is that bad? Definitely not. I don't need my tools to be fonts of warm fuzzy feelings. I need them to be useful.
Even if the questions were material, asking it about a whole screenshot composed of many different design changes inevitably muddles things. And asking it only of 1 old and 1 new screenshot invites people to judge on novelty, not utility.
So my suspicion is that the survey isn't really testing any useful hypotheses. We know that some people like new shiny and some people like old familiar. I don't think much is gained here.
Where are the question about usability and practicality ?
Said screenshots are from much different screen resolution so one is cluttered[1] and the other is illegible[2].
The whole survey gives the idea that the current design is bad and the new is better. I mean when you get asked to rate an old thing vs a new one on a scale between outdated and modern.
[1]: https://images.typeform.com/images/7E2EfHaFjYdy/image/defaul... [2]: https://images.typeform.com/images/7QpVmjRyBAU4/image/defaul...