Wow, super neat! I use TB as my daily driver but for calendar I resort to the GCal webview because is almost unusable, especially the "view event" window which is also an "edit event" window and that is very visually cluttered.
> By default, getting to this event preview screen requires only 1 click. And it’s 2 clicks to open the edit view (which you can do either in a new tab or a separate floating window).
Phew. I was a bit worried that tab support was going away because the UI in the screenshots with the giant search bar in the top toolbar doesn't seem conducive for it. I'm curious to see how tabs look/work with the new UI.
Yes, the v102 upgrade was a nightmare for many users. I actually had an exchange about that with the person behind Thunderbird's Twitter account after their announcement of Supernova:
> Neat. Please do test this thoroughly before release to avoid the v102 fiasco :). It made things difficult for both users and evangelists who take time to help others in using Thunderbird. [1]
> We hear you. Which is why we're doing this for Supernova: [2]
>> In the roadmap for Thunderbird Supernova (v. 115) you'll notice our goal is to complete most features by Q4 2022. That's because we're entering"feature-freeze" by end of 2022, then spending several months on polish. We want it to exceed your expectations!
Who would have thought civil exchanges about an issue was possible on the internet. And that too on Twitter!
Well done to you and the Thunderbird Twitter manager, along with the Thunderbird team that took action on trying to rectify the mistakes they made with their past release.
I've been using Thunderbird for both work email and personal email (via Protonmail Bridge) for a few years now. I'm really stoked to see it's getting the attention it deserves.
One minor thing I'd like to see, and I don't know if this is to do with the underlying calendaring spec, is the differentiation of physical location and online meeting.
Some events may have both and I have found the "Join" buttons on desktop notifications for Outlook/Teams to be pretty convenient.
This doesn't look all that different to the existing calendar really. They have moved the events section to the side instead of at the top and changed some of the sectioning going for the material view where the distinction between elements is just replaced with background coloured space. I am largely indifferent to this change, it doesn't look like its big or important or functionally impressive in any way. I am not going to collapse the weekends and it seems to be the only other new feature being offered is messing with colours for categories. I suspect most people use calendars for categories already, this may be an improvement for some people but its really not worth trying to merge calendars for this purpose as an existing user unless they make that easy (which there is no suggestion they will).
Change for fashion sake and nothing that users have been asking for, sums up all development out of Mozilla at the moment.
It's easy to say that, but I've had friends and colleagues not want to use Thunderbird because of it's UI. Honestly I think this would be enough to make them take a second look.
The fact that you are indifferent (as am I) is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.. They've made it more attractive to new users and also haven't alienated their existing user base.
There are so many things that could be better though that users actually request. Fixing the whole event -> View -> Edit that appears in windows (instead of tabs like emails) would be nice. Being able to select drag when you want to view as well since the top left calendar becomes largely useless. They could clear up the start/end display so events not crossing days didn't display the date twice. Would be nice to be able to review an event quickly just by clicking on it once instead of having to open and close a window, summaries have too much burden to them to appear modern.
Its a really old UI style from the 1990s and I am not seeing anything in this suggesting that will change. People will very quickly realise it does not behave in a modern way once they try to use it.
I wonder if people reporting issues is a negative signal for the priority of fixing them?
Like if someone cares enough to report an issue, they're probably invested and will stick around. If they didn't care, they wouldn't bother to report the issue.
You need to fix the issues that cause people to just give up and go elsewhere - the issues that don't get opened!
> I completely disagree with you. Should we go back to 90s website design just because users didn't ask for modern design practices?
So, a bunch of text with the content you want/need and a photo?
And we replaced that with multi-megabyte javascripts, autoplaying video ads, floating bars, breaking infinite scroll, breaking ajax, refresh that returns you to another page, not-working "back" buttons, popups asking to signup for a newsletter, to register, to fill out a survey, cookie popups, a bunch of sliders to disable all of them, notificiation request popups, location requests, etc?
There were plenty of terrible, unusable sites in the 90s, and there are tons of great ones now. People look back with crazy rose tinted glasses at these sorts of things.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk is 8.5mb, two bottom bars (accept cookies and login/signin), and after scrolling a page and a half down, i get a popup forcing me to login/signup.
Even relatively empty google is 1.8mb
This page (HN) is one of the few, that are not bloated, and allow you to read stuff without giving your personal data.
Thunderbird’s current UI makes it look like abandonware. It needed a UI refresh. The fact that they’ve managed to do this and make it look fresh while still not changing the workflow and the functionality drastically, so it won’t trouble long time users, is a great achievement.
I can keep working with the current (and past) Thunderbird interface forever. Some software is done and it needs updates only to keep up with changes to the OS and to protocols. Thunderbird is one of them IMHO.
I don't even use IMAP, nor calendar. I download from POP3 servers and use the calendar on my phone instead.
So you're not the target audience for this at all then.
If they get to a point where Android and Desktop Thunderbird have email, contacts and calendars synced, with a UI that's as nice as this mock it will be fantastic.
Sounds like OP is exactly the type of person who thunderbird should be targeting because it's impossible to compete on UI churn against google/facebook/apple. They have legions of graphics designers who need to do something to keep being employed. Open Source seems to have become a resume item for second rate devs to get hired into closed source companies.
I have to disagree. I've been using Thunderbird for well over a decade and I appreciate that the UI hasn't changed much. As I get older I much prefer software that changes slowly and incrementally, if at all - and sometimes no change is good, especially in the UI.
UI is the part of software most prone to fashion. Fashions go in and out, and UIs and their usability goes in and out with them. I would rather stick to a usable, well-known UI than have TB be trendy and strictly worse, like the "flat everything" fad, or the "you don't need options" fad, or the "header bar" fad.
I am not sure if you aware but Thunderbird was indeed droped by mozilla and now it is independent project, with quite a lot money from donations so they seem to be good for the future
That's right, it had been so long that I had forgotten. Thanks for reminding me.
Edit: Taking a further look into the history, it looks like the project has been under a lot of turmoil WRT shutting down and being revived. Explains why I have avoided it for so long.
>Thunderbird’s current UI makes it look like abandonware.
The type of person who cares about that will not be using it anyway. Trying to be hip is how firefox when from 30% market share to 3%. Stop going after people who don't care but are very loud.
I for one am glad with this visual cleanup. Thunderbird looks cluttered, and at least for me most of the clutter isn't useful, unlike certain other very busy, dense interfaces.
The last redesign (the mail client, not the calendar) is what prompted me to finally abandon it. Each redesign in Mozilla products, be it Firefox or Thunderbird, seems to make them worse. At that point I don't know of a good GUI mail client for Linux[1]. I'm spending more and more time on Mac these days, where in the case of mail clients I'm using Mailmate and am very satisfied.
Yeah. Honestly, I guess I cannot speak as a Thunderbird calendar user anymore, but precisely for that reason: it sucked so much compared to ubiqotuos Google Calendar, that I somehow couldn't justify using it anymore. Then I stopped using Google too, but I use desktop email client much less anyways now.
I'm not sure what really changed here. Maybe I should try and see it, but... really, I wish they'd just copied Google Calendar UI completely, making it an offline copy. Surely it's not perfect, but it was so, so much more fluent the last I tried. I mean, for me, it kinda did everything I wanted to, the only problem I ever had with it was that it's Google.
I really really like that Thunderbird is getting maintenance and new features even when I thought it had been abandoned by Mozilla years ago. Though I'm currently using Mail.app (and having used web mail before), I'm curious what happened, who are the developers, how the funding is going, what the relation to Moz is, and whether I should switch?
I also use Mail.app privately but Thunderbird on any Windows or Linux machine I work with. Outlook might look nice, however, I can’t bring myself to spend time to figure out the calendar in Outlook. When Thunderbird was not available, I’ve defaulted to looking up my appointments on Google calendar in the browser because that’s what my team at work is using.
I'd really like it work with Office365 out of the box. I know there are add-ons that do it (Owl being one of them), but native support just like the support for Gmail accounts would be great.
One thing that I actually like about Owl being paid (very inexpensive as it is) is that I trust it will be updated RIGHT NOW if Office 365 changes their non-API. As a business with paying customers, I expect that they are on top of these things.
This is the only real downside of Thunderbird as far as I’m concerned, other things like aesthetics just being matters of taste where you can’t please everyone. It’s become an annoying downside for me lately because one of my email addresses now only supports the web client and Exchange; no more IMAPS. I really cannot find another email client on Linux that works as well as Thunderbird though, at least not one that also supports Exchange, so Thunderbird it is. The new UI in OP looks great too.
Anyway, assuming you're talking about Sync, I find it quite helpful for the browser so have no issues with it being extended to Thunderbird. It is, as I understand it, always optional, and I even believe it's possible to self-host it, though I haven't tried.
every once in a while I look into what it takes to self host it and never get very far. The primary problem is that it is an internal tool used by mozilla and it shows, Don't get me wrong, I think it is great that mozilla provides the code but it does not have any of the polish that a tool intended for others to use get. I am sure I could get it going if I devoted a weekend to the effort. but have not yet been willing to put that much time into it.
off my head, first you have to get the account service up and running then you can get the sync service going then you have to trick your firefox installation to use your services.
I do, too. But that doesn't sync everything that Firefox sync does. But yeah, it's 90% there, and people running their own Nextcloud instance is obviously very niche.
Same but I find the new recent design to be a betterment this time. Not hard considering Thunderbird had imho a terrible UI. The left panel looks really nice and make the app different functions more readable.
They work already! When I add my email account, Thunderbird automatically configure my email, my calendar, my contacts, my tasks... all from my server. I even don't have to configure them each one manually.
Really? Wow! Ive never been able to get everything from fastmail to come over correctly. My calendars were read only and I didnt get full contact info.
I don't have tbsync and I don't think any other extension I use added support for that.
Simply select "On the Network" when adding a calendar, set a user name and enter the remote dav location.
For address books use "Add CardDAV Address Book", also username and dav location.
Looks nice to me, granted I have not been following Thunderbird, as I believed it to be dead[0] over a decade ago. Its nice to see that the community has keep it alive!
For Thunderbird users, do you find it interfaces well with Google Workspace Email (Gmail) and Calendar? I prefer native clients to their interface usually but Apple Mail isn't the greatest so I've been using the web interface and I don't particularly enjoy it.
I use BusyCal for calendar and I like it, but I'd love to have it in a "suite" like this, just makes things easier.
The only problem I've had with GMail via Thunderbird is that some orgs block IMAP access.
I've been quite happy with Calendar as well. You don't get real-time sync and all of the Google Calendar goodies like viewing other people's schedules, adding Google Meet links easily, room booking and probably more are missing. But I've found that using it as mostly view-only works well, then I schedule meetings in the webUI.
That being said the calendar interface has been fairly awkward in the past, so I'm really excited about this new version. I'm sure there will be some rough edges but if they can fix the alignment of events with respect to start+end time and make the view/edit dialog less awful it would be a huge win.
I've used Thunderbird with GMail for years, using POP, not IMAP.
It works well. However, in the last few months, the GMail Spam filtering service has stopped working with POP. Items marked as Spam in GMail still get downloaded.
I learnt this the hard way in the early days of interneting.
Lost all my emails after an IBM hard drive died on me and my email client was using POP to retrieve mail.
Pop can be configured either way, but what I wonder: doesn't this presume you only ever use one client? For me that would not work at all. Unless you sync mail between your clients another way, then I am all ears.
I am pretty sure IMAP can be configured to delete mail from server after sync, and anyway Google has all the time in the world to scan your emails before you delete them.
It works fine, unless you want to use Google Calendar and a non-Gmail email together. Then it goes nuts and makes your Gmail send out calendar invites instead of the email you use.
Oh god, I have some horrible memories when I set up a forwarder from employers Lotus Notes calendar to my Google Calendar. It turned out that Google was very aggressively parsing the body test and recipients of all events and re-sending invites. Also for that company all hands meeting I was invited to, in my first week. No way to disable this, so ended up having to write some custom parser for exported ics files, to strip out the email addresses.
Actually it was the best option I had on Linux for O365 corporate email client. They added OAuth support probably during the past 2 years and they added some important features to the calendar notification about a year ago. The calendar has always been kind of behind though. It definitely wasn't dead but absolutely lots of room for growth. This post made me excited.
This is an honest question from someone who didn't use nor install Thunderbird for over a decade.
Is it better than Google calendar? I mean, am I missing a lot by using the Google apps as they are from a browser?
I hope I am, to be honest, so I can give it a try.
What are the odds of this coming to a standalone Sunbird client?
I've never really liked my email and calendar being in the same app. Especially not the same window, makes cross referencing a PITA. One of the things Apple gets right.
I understand this doesn't address your core complaint, but you can right click on the calender tab in Thunderbird and open it in a new window. It's not the same thing at all, but it's a workaround I use.
132 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadCan't wait to test this on my laptop!
Phew. I was a bit worried that tab support was going away because the UI in the screenshots with the giant search bar in the top toolbar doesn't seem conducive for it. I'm curious to see how tabs look/work with the new UI.
Very excited to see Thunderbird calendar being modernized since I feel like it’s always been a step behind Outlook’s.
I am still on 91.13.1 because 102 is causing various issues, most (maybe all) of them already reported.
In fact, it runs perfectly on my Kubuntu machine.
Both comments are the same thing just from opposite sites.
> Neat. Please do test this thoroughly before release to avoid the v102 fiasco :). It made things difficult for both users and evangelists who take time to help others in using Thunderbird. [1]
> We hear you. Which is why we're doing this for Supernova: [2]
>> In the roadmap for Thunderbird Supernova (v. 115) you'll notice our goal is to complete most features by Q4 2022. That's because we're entering"feature-freeze" by end of 2022, then spending several months on polish. We want it to exceed your expectations!
[1] https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/1590400298517864448
[2] https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/159040241315584409...
Well done to you and the Thunderbird Twitter manager, along with the Thunderbird team that took action on trying to rectify the mistakes they made with their past release.
I have to use Outlook 365 and am surprised how much better Thunderbird is than Microsoft's offering.
One minor thing I'd like to see, and I don't know if this is to do with the underlying calendaring spec, is the differentiation of physical location and online meeting.
Some events may have both and I have found the "Join" buttons on desktop notifications for Outlook/Teams to be pretty convenient.
Change for fashion sake and nothing that users have been asking for, sums up all development out of Mozilla at the moment.
The fact that you are indifferent (as am I) is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.. They've made it more attractive to new users and also haven't alienated their existing user base.
Its a really old UI style from the 1990s and I am not seeing anything in this suggesting that will change. People will very quickly realise it does not behave in a modern way once they try to use it.
Like if someone cares enough to report an issue, they're probably invested and will stick around. If they didn't care, they wouldn't bother to report the issue.
You need to fix the issues that cause people to just give up and go elsewhere - the issues that don't get opened!
Thunderbird's calendar redesign brings it in line with what customers expect from a calendar app and make it more user friendly.
So, a bunch of text with the content you want/need and a photo?
And we replaced that with multi-megabyte javascripts, autoplaying video ads, floating bars, breaking infinite scroll, breaking ajax, refresh that returns you to another page, not-working "back" buttons, popups asking to signup for a newsletter, to register, to fill out a survey, cookie popups, a bunch of sliders to disable all of them, notificiation request popups, location requests, etc?
Yeah, i like even this:
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
a lot more than:
https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
https://twitter.com/elonmusk is 8.5mb, two bottom bars (accept cookies and login/signin), and after scrolling a page and a half down, i get a popup forcing me to login/signup.
Even relatively empty google is 1.8mb
This page (HN) is one of the few, that are not bloated, and allow you to read stuff without giving your personal data.
At least for news sites yes, please.
https://isp.netscape.com/
SerenityOS has a better UI than all other Linux distributions. 90s inspired. So yes I guess?
Not only Linux DEs are to blame here, Windows does it to (sometimes). Probably all stemming form the handicapped mobile interfaces.
You mean, like the one we are all reading right now?
I don't even use IMAP, nor calendar. I download from POP3 servers and use the calendar on my phone instead.
If they get to a point where Android and Desktop Thunderbird have email, contacts and calendars synced, with a UI that's as nice as this mock it will be fantastic.
UI is the part of software most prone to fashion. Fashions go in and out, and UIs and their usability goes in and out with them. I would rather stick to a usable, well-known UI than have TB be trendy and strictly worse, like the "flat everything" fad, or the "you don't need options" fad, or the "header bar" fad.
Edit: Taking a further look into the history, it looks like the project has been under a lot of turmoil WRT shutting down and being revived. Explains why I have avoided it for so long.
The type of person who cares about that will not be using it anyway. Trying to be hip is how firefox when from 30% market share to 3%. Stop going after people who don't care but are very loud.
I'm not sure what really changed here. Maybe I should try and see it, but... really, I wish they'd just copied Google Calendar UI completely, making it an offline copy. Surely it's not perfect, but it was so, so much more fluent the last I tried. I mean, for me, it kinda did everything I wanted to, the only problem I ever had with it was that it's Google.
One thing that I actually like about Owl being paid (very inexpensive as it is) is that I trust it will be updated RIGHT NOW if Office 365 changes their non-API. As a business with paying customers, I expect that they are on top of these things.
Anyway, assuming you're talking about Sync, I find it quite helpful for the browser so have no issues with it being extended to Thunderbird. It is, as I understand it, always optional, and I even believe it's possible to self-host it, though I haven't tried.
off my head, first you have to get the account service up and running then you can get the sync service going then you have to trick your firefox installation to use your services.
That said it would be even better if I could sync through my own Nextcloud instance instead of through Mozilla Sync.
Simply select "On the Network" when adding a calendar, set a user name and enter the remote dav location. For address books use "Add CardDAV Address Book", also username and dav location.
For Thunderbird users, do you find it interfaces well with Google Workspace Email (Gmail) and Calendar? I prefer native clients to their interface usually but Apple Mail isn't the greatest so I've been using the web interface and I don't particularly enjoy it.
I use BusyCal for calendar and I like it, but I'd love to have it in a "suite" like this, just makes things easier.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-furth...
I've been quite happy with Calendar as well. You don't get real-time sync and all of the Google Calendar goodies like viewing other people's schedules, adding Google Meet links easily, room booking and probably more are missing. But I've found that using it as mostly view-only works well, then I schedule meetings in the webUI.
That being said the calendar interface has been fairly awkward in the past, so I'm really excited about this new version. I'm sure there will be some rough edges but if they can fix the alignment of events with respect to start+end time and make the view/edit dialog less awful it would be a huge win.
It works well. However, in the last few months, the GMail Spam filtering service has stopped working with POP. Items marked as Spam in GMail still get downloaded.
I guess Google wants us to use their web-client.
Fortunately I had (some) backups
Is it better than Google calendar? I mean, am I missing a lot by using the Google apps as they are from a browser? I hope I am, to be honest, so I can give it a try.
I've never really liked my email and calendar being in the same app. Especially not the same window, makes cross referencing a PITA. One of the things Apple gets right.