> Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.
There's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!
I thought that Thunderbird was a native application for quite a long time. For some reason it never had the same icky feeling I get from any Electron application (even supposedly "high quality" ones) and worked fast on crappy machines (which is what I've typically used throughout the life). Of course, performance went a bit downhill since they abandoned XUL in favor of pure HTML, but still.
Reading the article, I was expecting the dreaded “and we’re rebuilding it on Electron” (because apparently that’s the only way anyone knows to build a desktop app nowadays), but apparently they don’t plan to move to an entirely different technical base, just to rewrite stuff.
For me it doesn't really work. Searching any large folder completely stalls the UI for a few seconds. How can it be so slow to go through a bit of text?
The filter on a single folder is not slow and never stalls the UI. Caveats: I'm on Linux, maybe my large folders are not so large, if it stalls for you it's probably stalling for many more people with similar setups.
> “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 literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.
You drastically overestimate the general software consumer.
Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI.
But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"
I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast, especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me, so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear in multiple folders without affecting performance.
I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...
It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but the performance is really horrific.
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.
In fairness, if you're as bad as I am at actually deleting email, you probably had something like 15 years less email accumulation.
I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.
Same situation. A few years ago I started moving old emails into yearly sub folders (just moved all of last years emails into a “2022” folder). This improved performance a lot for me. I’m guessing the smaller folders of emails keep the index files small. Search still works through all of those folders.
I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.
(Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)
"mark as read" happens automatically whereas archive is an explicit action (pressing "e" on your keyboard after enabling hotkeys or swiping the email on mobile)
This lets you turn the inbox into a sort of TODO list that only shows you stuff that's still pending. Of course you also have to use filters aggressively if you wanna maintain inbox-zero without having to manually archive every "your bank statement is ready" email.
> Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.
If they're basically stacked on top of 90% of firefox (which is how I understand it to work), then it's not necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top of a framework that gets bloated.
It's funny you mention that because the experience of trying to connect to Exchange with it is bad enough to cow me into using Outlook after all (of course it doesn't help that calendar support is also shunted off to an extension that never worked that well for me).
But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102).
Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.
I actually just switched to Thunderbird last year because I needed to post a patch to a mailing list and I couldn't find any mail apps for Windows that could do it properly. Previously I used Alpine, but that was a much worse experience because pasting didn't work so I had to clumsily read in a prepared file from disk and not touch any other keys after that for fear of it rewrapping everything. If there are any other mail apps that do this better, and can still connect to "modern" (read: annoying) oauth setups like Office365 etc, I'd definitely be interested in trying them. I don't hate Thunderbird, but to me it seems like the least bad option for supporting both modern top-quote style HTML email and oldskool 7 bit ASCII/triangle bracket quoting/inline patch style email.
Same. I wouldn't put up with this from any other app. In the last few months it has taken to seizing up for 2-10 seconds at a time in the middle of writing. I've been holding out hope a new release will magically get better. Or that I'll dig deep into what's going on and figure out what the cause is. But switching over to webmail is getting more and more tempting.
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 user.
I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.
The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to be sitting idle.
> 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 new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.
There are a lot of qualifiers there. The linked post by Thunderbird’s Product Design manager spends a lot of time talking about tech debt and feature availability, and not so much about problems with the interface. Indeed, it has a reassuring amount of respect for the current interface, describing a future that "allow[s] veteran users to maintain that familiarity they love".
It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.
> 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 market leader. That annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.
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.
That's a good point about gmail, but I was thinking of outlook, apple mail, the gnome mail client, and this one called mimestream that I use now. They all have that same familiar 3 column layout: mailboxes, list of messages, message contents. That layout has been the norm for a while, so I think calling it trendy is a bit of a stretch.
I started using thunderbird half a year ago and like the interface. Sure, there's problems (I haven't encountered a lot of them), but the overall user experience is far better than what I'm used to from other email programs. The only thing that stuck out negatively was when I was searching for an email, in which the way I was wanting to solve it didn't work out as I thought it did. (I was looking for a mail containing specific words from a specific group of senders).
Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure that there will be more new users faster than old users leaving. If it doesn't work out, chances are that they ain't coming back.
I can't say anything about keeping TB open and having it steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail. Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht shouldn't create problems, however.
I've been running Thunderbird in the background without problems the last 15-odd years on whatever computer I had at the time. Still do. No performance problems running 20+ mail accounts with loads and loads of mail. Ofcourse it can be slow if you do things that requires TB to recreate the mail storage but other than that I have no problem opening mail and reading it fast. I'm using both IMAP and POP3 accounts mixed.
I believe there are settings you can run that might create more problems with performance but I haven't touched anything the last 5 years so can't say what it was any more.
I do not think I have touched anything either since I like keeping as much at default as possible, but maybe I have and just do not know it, but it is dog slow for me.
> 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...
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?
Because it is open source? Sure, but so is Chromium. But both seem to have mostly cathedral-style development and someone outside of Mozilla is unlikely to be able to influence the direction of the project in any meaningful way. It's open source software but not an open source project. User feedback is continuously ignored, often with the only argument being developer convenience.
Because of a focus on privacy? While they do like to push that angle in their marketing and in some ways do more to prevent websites from tracking you they show little concern for making the browser itself respect your privacy with opt out telemetry, eperiments, in-browser advertising and more. Again, any user pushback is summarily dismissed.
The only remaining advantage are some niche features here and there. And those are often provided by extension whose API Mozilla limits more and more.
So I still use Firefox but its only because it is the lesser evil, and the differrence is shrinking. I certainly don't trust Mozilla's autoupdates and won't use upstream builds. Thankfully Linux distros still provide a last defense layer - but that we need that layer at all for something that is supposed to be an open browser is ridiculous. I don't fault anyone who says fuck it and just uses Chrome so that ALL sites work out of the box.
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.
No, but I think they would have if they have continued to develop their own interface iteratively without just blindly copying Chrome. Right now there is for many no reason to pick Firefox over Chrome because they are so similar.
That wouldn't have gained them appreciable new users, but it would have slowed losses. Almost all my browsing is done in Chrome and Brave now. There's not really any reason to use Firefox besides habit now, and I don't, except on my desktop.
Mozilla somehow failed to recognize their entire core userbase was power users and Firefox fans, which relentlessly evangelized the product to other people, going around installing it on grandma's computer.
Then they failed to recognize that while Chrome was a comparable technical product, maybe even slightly better in some ways, the reason for its success it because it was relentlessly shilled by a huge megacorporation that pushed it in advertising, on the world's biggest web properties, and even had it packaged in installers for other products.
Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Chrome by assuming that "if we were just more like Chrome, people would use us", or "we need to make a browser for grandma." Grandma doesn't download browsers. That is, unless a big banner comes up on YouTube telling her she needs to download Chrome for the best experience. By alienating its core "fanbase" or whatever you want to call it, by alienating its power users, Firefox alienated the only demographic it ever had an actual shot with. Unless you count the even-smaller real-open-source-only-we-need-web-freedom demographic.
Hard to quantify because you'd have to take account of what actual improvements they might have made instead of spending dev hours on UI, settings and defaults tweaks that mostly served to alienate their core users (IMO).
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.
> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
And that risks doing absolute horseshit. Outlook's new UI for example hides the cc/bcc behind an additional click, extremely annoying for anyone but personal mail usage. How MS still haven't managed to discover and fix that with their billions of corporate users is astonishing.
> ... so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab [and] load Google Mail
Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an already running browser is faster than starting a web browser albatross afresh.
Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes well.
Nope, the issues seem to lie more in just plain bad code. It is seems to be mostly their IMAP code and their mbox code which goes crazy and starts using all CPU, not the UI. The issues happen when opening folders too.
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 features - for example, I can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook
I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!
Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.
If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.
I definitely used Thunderbird for an O365 account that required 2FA and so had to use OAuth, back to.... 2021 at least, I think. Though I think you might have had to know to change the auth method to OAuth to get it working, at least at the time.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I used to use the Enigmail plug in which worked okay.
Since its deprecation and Thunderbird's integration of GPG, there were a few hiccups (mostly UI differences between Enigmail and native TB support), but none with key management.
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
Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB.
It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."
But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.
I've used it on Linux since 2005 at least, and my only problems were importing a big Outlook .pst and having trouble with its formatting and attachments. It's open daily on my machine, and while it has become more memory hungry, the CPU usage is minimum.
On my Ryzen 7 4800H (8 core) 16GB laptop running Linux Mint, Thunderbird Mail is using 290MB-360MB of RAM. Mostly no registered CPU usage, but when I clicked around a few folders, it went up to about 3% very briefly.
> It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."
You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.
Besides the sibling comment by Gare to change the default, you can do this on a per-folder basis by right-clicking, Properties... and checking the box:
"When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder"
A mail client taking up to 0.2% CPU doing nothing (I assume you're not interacting with it, nor is it trying to download/upload mail or similar), on a "high-end desktop", is itself a little surprising.
I'm watching it now, and it's sitting at 0%. Considering it does poll for emails from time to time (maybe 1x minute) I don't thinks it bad that it ramps up to 0.1% to do so.
Discord, Teams, Firefox, and Slack all seem to use 0-0.1% without much interaction (though I am typing into Firefox right now!) - Thunderbird seems to be 0% more often than not.
A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere that this speed difference is due to antivirus.
I guess 'notable' means something like >= 0.01% in this case. But tech debt is an issue if nobody can effectively fork off anything if unhappy with the direction taken.
It's crazy that it's slower than an Electron app! Like most HNers, I fully believe that any JavaScript is slower than native, so how can this be false for this app???
The post said that Thunderbird is an app running on top of Firefox, so it's not much different than an Electron app. There are probably many more layers than a native one. Slowness is too new expected but actually I never felt that Thunderbird is slow. I use it daily.
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.
In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.
I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process
I prefer email sitting in the outbox for a short period of time before send/receive completes, it has saved me from mistakes enough times that it is worth the delay.
> I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.
I can't complain about performance. My profile folder is ~90 GB. I have multiple email accounts connected and a large local folder which contains email from Google Takeout since I had to delete some (larger) emails from my Google mail to make space. That being said, it would be nice to not see application not responding messages on Fedora (Gnome) as much.
On my Linux machine, there's noticeable latency when scrolling through the messages pane. I use the vertical (side by side) layout, but the delay disappears when I use the stacked layout. The jankiness seems to be a function of the messages pane's height.
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 liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.
The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.
>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?
Out of curiosity: We're talking "magnitude higher", so that means 1k to 5k mails each day.
How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?
Outlook is very slow for me, but I only use it on my work laptop.
Thunderbird is almost as slow, and that's on my own desktop.
Even something simple like mousing over emails in the list is slow - there is a noticable delay between the mouse reaching each email, and the grey highlight.
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
I switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use.
Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.
I have multiple mailboxes, which are quite large. Never saw a performance problem at all and I am dumbfounded what could be the issue for people. Its speed and ease of use is why I prefer it to web mail by a large margin. It starts quicker than my browser too.
This! On my Xubuntu installation(s) the rendering has become so slow to almost be unusable. There were some helpful tips floating around to remedy this situation (turning off webrender seemed to help) but these have stopped working as well.
I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.
If I had to guess, I would say that they mentioned it indirectly, by way of saying they need to first eliminate a fair bit of technical debt. They don't want to build new things on a crumbling foundation, so such features are too far away to announce directly.
Is JMAP really enough of an improvement over the standards it is trying to replace to warrant throwing out old, working code built to the old standards? Apple Mail on my iPhone uses IMAP and seems plenty fast for me. Is it the best use of Thunderbird's limited resources to support a new standard, and adding correspondingly fewer other improvements in the meantime? I can understand why they might decide "no."
As a sole maintainer of a TB add-on, I can't wait for it to completely stop working until rewritten yet again when old TB API gets removed and new version goes live.
Apple Mail on OSX 10.4 (originally NeXT) working well today fyi
the industrial strength, bullet proof, complex but profoundly reliable engineering within Apple Mail shows itself to have stability over decades.
Why is this Thunderbird rewrite going to succeed ? A glossy sales pitch makes it less convincing, not more. This is a years' long project with no guranteed outcomes.. in fact, I would suspect that noveau security trappings and trend-based GUI embellishments would almost guarantee a "mayfly life" at great expense, contrasted to the Oak trees of original Internet standards.
I think Apple Mail was unusable around that time for me. I think it mangled attachments to/from Windows, font sizing was off (i forget if it was previews or when writing). Search didn't work.
Yeah, old versions of Apple Mail used some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues around attachments. I use the modern version, but NextMail was a different thing and legacy bits hung around for a while.
The only email client that I acknowledge. Used it since the day one. I think that this refactoring is going to be a huge undertake. I hope that they will make it.
There's one area where I've always thought Thunderbird should be a cross platform leader and example to everyone: setting Email Client Standards.
I spent a lot of time in the anti-phishing/anti-fraud world. During a stint at dmarcian I wrote up an entire proposal that I titled A.P.E.C.S. - Anti-Phishing Email Client Standards. I should probably publish this document at some point since it looks like they've since taken it down and IMO, it still needs to happen.
When you dive hard into the email security problem you quickly discover that there are layers to how end users are exploited.
- Sending Mail Servers
- Receiving Mail Servers
- Information presented to users in the mail client
- Links and attachments in the emails themselves
- The phishing sites they link to
Each layer of this process needs to be addressed. DMARC let's sending mail servers verify that they are actually allowed to send email on behalf of the domain. That alone is a huge scope of the problem and puts the domain owner in charge of preventing abuse from their own domain.
Receiving mail servers have a number of factors that they use to verify inbound emails and DMARC makes that process a lot easier, but you still have to have spam filters, virus scans, IP and sender reputation management, reverse DNS lookups. The tools supporting users here are always getting better but they won't ever be perfect.
The mail client itself is critical though. We know the filters aren't perfect and typically have to err on the side of deliverability, which means that users are going to see messages that the mail server thought were questionable. You're already seeing warning messages in Google for things like this, but the factors here can absolutely be standardized around a number of factors. Users don't respond to "you can trust this" indicators (studies show, don't have them handy) but they do respond to warnings as long as the warnings are very targeted and rare. If you get a warning about every message, it's going to get ignored.
Links and attachments are also in the mail client scope. Attachment scans and link reputation absolutely need to be a part of the scope of this problem. There's an opportunity for link trust to be standardized in the same way as dmarc. Does the URL match the DMARC sender? Cool, that's a really good sign. Is the URL going through a shortener or other tracking system? In that case, there's probably a lot more risk involved. In order to bypass filters, shorteners will link to something safe and then change the redirect target after successful delivery. Reputation scores need to be tracked on shorteners based on immutability of links and responsiveness to abuse take downs. If they don't, then those services should generate a giant warning in the email client and potentially even have the link disabled in the message.
Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who's linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped.
That's the high level. The standards are needed and should be applied across every email client vendor, from Thunderbird to Gmail to Outlook/365 to Fastmail to Apple. IMO Thunderbird has an opportunity to lead the charge here and become a force that protects people from phishing at the point of consumption, regardless of the rules on the mail server itself.
> I should probably publish this document at some point
I'd be interested in seeing it. It sounds like a pretty good idea. It's incredible to me how effective even the worst phishing email/sites are and to me that's an indication that not enough is being done to point out clear warning signs to users.
> Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who's linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped.
The URL shorteners can be the worst. They don't seem to care who creates a link to something, and don't do even basic checking of whats at the other end. You'd think a person creating a link to yet another URL shortener would set off major flags, but they don't seem to care.
Same with survey/form sites that keep being hijacked for phishing purposes. They don't bother with even basic checking for scams either. If someone creates a form with a password field that'd be easy to flag for review, but it doesn't happen. I can report a bunch of identical phishing sites that were created with URLs like:
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname001
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname002
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname003
and while they'll generally take them down, they'll do nothing to prevent:
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname004
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname005
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname006
from being created. Not checking for targetcompanyname in the url of new forms/surveys, and not bothering to check to see if the 12 new sites someone just created are identical to the last 12 they were asked to disable.
Anything that can be done to help make those sites less attractive to users before they even click the link in the email they got would really help.
I use Thunderbird as my main mail client and love it. I've tried a number of clients and always come back to it. The two big things for me are the search and the ecosystem of add-ons.
I do hope the redesign considers add-on developers. A lot have been abandoned by their maintainers who become frustrated with keeping up with Thunderbird's changes. One thing I'd love to see is an easy way to send money to support add-on creators.
It's probably the worst of all email clients we've tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can't find emails when searching for a name. It's so bad.
There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).
It's crazy looking at their bugtracker, it's just years and years of accumulated issues. I ran into one the other day with a time zone setting on invites, and sure enough there is the bug report in their tracker buried in infinity.
I also hate search. The other day someone gave me a tip though, which has helped quite a bit. The global search and the other search you get in your inbox suck so don't use them.
The actual search that works "okay" if when you right click on a folder and select 'Search Messages'. Sorry if you know this already, but I didn't know and it's so much better searching through this interface as opposed to the other two.
dear Mozilla, no matter what you do to the UI, it will not make the general population interested in your products. you're just pissing your Google cash away while also pissing off the only userbase you have - powerusers
I've used Thunderbird Portable for years to backup my Google Workspace email. Prior to that it was my primary email client. Really hope it survives and thrives, I could care less how it looks.
> The curse: coordinating efforts across a volunteer community was challenging…
> …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience.
Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" really never stops giving.
You don't actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workforce -- someone has to coordinate all that, or else what you're going to get is a mess, both under the hood and in what is visible. And coordinating all that is hard and resource-intensive, the more so the _more_ developers involved.
Some open source projects manage to do that coordination with a decentralized volunteer coordinating staff (although in many cases, it's not truly "volunteer", it's people being paid by various employers collaborating across organizations/employers -- this was in fact most of original open source success stories). But it's not easy. And requires stability and tenure in that decentralized coordinating staff, to hold the vision, and to have the relationships to work together in a unified way. (A "benevolent dictator" is another way to do it).
The hardest part of developing software that is too much for one person to do by themselves (and that one person never leaves), is always the inter-personal communication, coordination, and shared-mental-model-making-and-sharing, not the coding.
So anyway, without being involved in Thunderbird at all, I totally believe this story, and that bringing it back into an organization of paid employees as a core was necessary to prevent complete disintegration (I mean, other organizational solutions are possible too, but they are all even more challenging, this is the simplest), because... that's how it works.
One entity (person/group) with a strong product vision + a giant decentralized workforce is pretty much how everything gets built. The actual people putting hands to keyboard have the mythical man month thing going for them.
The part of mythical man month I was thinking of, which I consider the most famous/useful take-away, is how adding people to a project will not necessarily make it go faster, because the more people, the more coordination work -- and Brooks paid a lot of attention to the fact that the "coordination work" isn't just, like, issuing orders and monitoring people, but involves building and sharing and maintaining "mental models", a vision for how it all goes together in a consistent and coherent way.
i don't think that vision can be developed and maintained succesfully only by people who never get their hands dirty, it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.
> it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.
There's a danger here too in that you can iterate on a design in a "monolithic" way where you iterate over a brittle design that's still hard to work with years later because you need to reload the entire system into your brain to make sense of it again.
Looking at Unix as an open source design success story, it was designed in relatively well-defined "layers". So for example it can get away with making literally everything a "file" with a common file interface, even if you're actually working with a physical peripheral or a "black hole" like /dev/null. And on these layers you can build all kinds of different implementations.
I try to push for a similar approach even on proprietary projects because if we can compartmentalize what we need to know to work with the pieces of our systems, they'll be easier to understand with less effort than if we need to understand everything about them before iterating on them.
And this can be passively "encouraged" by how the work is divided across teams/workgroups to leverage Conway's Law (which can also just as easily lead to software components that don't make any engineering sense if people aren't conscious of the effect their organization has on their software's organization).
If they are looking for paths going forward, I hope they investigate what PopOS is doing with rust (COSMIC) [0] and Iced [1] (cross platform ui library).
Uhg. This is the exact opposite of what direction I want from Thunderbird. I want it to remain stable. I want it to remain looking like an email client I run on my native OS. I do not want giant white-space webshit design and an entire rebuild that makes all my extensions and well trained spam detection .dat unusable.
Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.
Yeah, they should work on fixing bugs, improving performance, fixing search and adding some features. The UI is fine, it is the best thing of Thunderbird.
I read the article and sounds like the rewrite is mostly to do with large amounts of technical debt and being tied to firefox's development cycle. This should enable them to fix bugs if they don't have to fight code always coming from an alternative product.
I read it too and I am not as hopefully as you given how previous changes have mostly made the performance worse than fixed anything. Hope I am wrong though.
Extensions are not really a problem, cause Thunderbird have made it to scare off many over the years. They change rules, api, etc. many extension are not maintained, not compatible, whatever. I stopped installing and using Thunderbird extensions, it took me too much time and nerves on updates.
I believe you missed the part where the codebase has become impossible to work on. This isn't change "for change's sake", it's "because if we don't, this product is dead".
Thunderbird is absolutely due for a UX and feature set overhaul. But please please please don't follow current design trends: Thunderbird users are not and will probably never be people who appreciate the "everything is a mobile app" fad of the last few years. The term "webshit" absolutely feels apt here, and I would gladly triple my donation for the coming year if it meant that they committed to maintaining a traditional desktop look and feel in the rewrite.
I will probably need to look for alternatives, if I catch any sniff of "we are an electron app now" or similar. In that case I will probably only use the older version as a lookup program for past e-mails, if I cannot import them into something else. Or I stick with an old version of Thunderbird.
XUL is still hiding in there I think, though most things in Firefox have been rewritten in regular HTML. Not sure about Thunderbird, though the new settings page suspiciously looks like the Firefox one, so if not everything has been migrated yet, some stuff definitely have.
Either way, Gecko is what renders XUL and HTML, and therefore Thunderbird. It's essentially a big chunk of web stuff. It has always been this way.
Though I think Gecko is a tad more memory efficient than Chromium / Electron, and a lot nicer to use than your average Electron app.
And I'm pretty certain Thunderbird is staying this way. Becoming an Electron app would be a huge rewrite, and I think Thunderbird devs like Gecko. They say it in the blog post. It's not happening.
And I want a better design with better out-of-the-box, turn-key support for both Outlook/Exchange and GMail for contacts, mail (with proper conversations/threading), and calendaring. The extensions are clunky, and it always takes way too much time to get even remotely close to looking/acting correct.
Frankly, it's surprising how long they managed to drag it along given they build on top of a weird fork of Firefox ESR. Their foundation is crumbling for years and years. They really need to get off of it.
Unfortunately the web keeps changing. Firefox is trying hard to remain relevant and needs to be flexible with their code-base. So Thunderbird does not live in a stable world.
In TFA it says that Thunderbird is built on top of Firefox, which makes it difficult for them to keep up and causes a lot of churn and bugs. I imagine that’s what the parent poster is referring to.
Yes, and today, to render mails, you need a web engine. Unless you only want to deal with text email but that comes from with its fair share of tradeoffs, including the occasional unreadable email in text… which you'll open in a web browser.
And as a mail client you'd better follow the security fixes of the web engine you are using.
I guess not everyone is willing to use an old web engine derived from an old version of Word and maintain this thing for the eternity.
I like that Thunderbird exactly looks like what it looked like when I started using it in 2005, 18 years ago (save for the OS theme in use).
Though I would not mind some refresh. Many (younger? and as young as me, actually) people who are used to webmails and mobile apps find it ugly, and I can see that.
The world is missing a fast and efficient desktop mail client that looks good and I'd be glad if Thunderbird were it.
There's a world in which the Thunderbird team understands they have a huge number of long time users and they should be careful to keep it usable for them, where they will take feedback and in which they build something that doesn't suck for people who don't now it yet, and this world could be ours.
Wait and see? I understand the concern and that many people are worried, I also don't quite like the trend of UIs with a lot of space lacking contrast everywhere, but I think a good outcome is actually likely.
No. If you want a “pretty” email client go make one and see how it does. Stability is the number one feature I want in a UI. The only other concern is responsiveness. Literally nothing else matters.
It's not like it's easy. It crossed my mind a few years ago, actually. But why should I when the email client I actually happen to use decided to actually rebuild its interface? I'm not the one who is unhappy, I'm happy either way actually, I could answer "go fork Thunderbird if you are not happy".
There was an interesting talk at FOSDEM by OpenProject on how to handle UI revamps [1], there are ways to do it without breaking current users. I recommend it, I'm quite picky on presentations but this one was really good and I enjoyed it.
I agree that UI stability is important. UI stability is not the only important thing. Responsiveness indeed too. I hate slow UIs. Consistency with what users are used to (from the rest of the world) is very important too.
What's more, I read in the blog post that they are rebuilding the UI from scratch, but what I don't read is that they decided to change everything.
They can do it right. I can't say they will, but… again, let's see? I'm sure they'd be glad to receive feedback, questions and concerns.
Am I the only one enthusiastic about some potential Thunderbird UI revamp here?
I don't like many UI/UX choices on the current web, but I also like what KDE has been doing, and maybe Gnome too, there are places where UIs get better! Why not Thunderbird?
What if I decide to remap your keyboard every 12 months because I think I have a better layout? If you practice for an hour a day you'll adjust in a month! Of course that will go out the window 11 months later, but I will have my promo in by then. Apple literally does this with keyboard shortcuts and UI elements in MacOS. This is what I imagine when I hear someone wants to "revamp" a UI.
In modern software "UI revamp" means turning muscle memory into papercuts.
Mozilla can rebuild the UI without redesigning it. If they need to throw out underlying code to improve performance or maintainability that's fine. But changing UI elements is like renaming a boat. You just don't do it.
If you decide to turn my functional if bulky 70s office building into something a bit fresher I won't mind. Of course don't do it every month but Thunderbird hasn't changed for twenty years.
Apart from the attach button that was put at the other side of the compose window. That was annoying.
I fully expect the new UI to have a mode resembling the current one and the current keyboard shortcuts to still work. Now, if it's not the case I'll agree with you.
I too am pretty pissed off by many UI revamps and modern web UIs in general, but I'm quite confident because Thunderbird is not your regular shitty web app powered by a horde of investors.
> if you decide to turn my functional if bulky 70s office building into something a bit fresher I won't mind.
I worked in one of these and it was the best office space ever. Built into a nature preserve. There were paths along the water between the buildings. Everyone had an office with a window and view of trees and water. It was dated but I had zero complaints. We got bought by a company in Silicon Valley and they moved us to an "open office" in what was essentially a warehouse. Fancy new furniture and desks, none of it better than what we already had. Attractive but uncomfortable. The development team was placed next to sales, which is about as loud as an elementary school at recess. It was horrible. The only view was of a retaining wall in the parking lot. Nothing about it was better. Even the HVAC was worse.
They didn't keep the features that mattered to you and implemented this badly on top of it. Of course it's bad.
Okay, that's a tangent, but
if done well, new buildings should be better because we improved on many plans.
At the campus in which I studied, 70s buildings are mostly ugly and badly isolated (done quickly all at the same time because they were needed quickly, standards of back then, also fairly solid). Cold in winter, hot in summer, quite dark inside overall at least for the corridors.
They did a decent job for the new buildings. Rooms still have the same number of people. Those buildings are rented for 30 years costing a lot to the university but they are better overall.
So, yeah. In both cases, new stuff can be better but of course it needs to be well done, stuff that matter need to be there and users listened.
There are a ton of desktop email clients that have that design: Apple Mail, Windows 10/11 Mail application, Outlook, Mailspring, whatever.
Of client that have the UI/UX of Thunderbird... well only Thunderbird remained. I get that if you use the email sporadically with only one account, you are better with a client like you described, but at that point you can as well use a webmail.
Otherwise if you work with emails, and you manage tens or hundreds of email each day, Thunderbird interface is great, is compact, is essential, is functional. Not pretty, but works well, it's stable, it's reliable.
Thunderbird is a work tool, and a work tool to me doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work.
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 efficient.
I agree with the pros you find to the UI of Thunderbird and that's why I use it. But non-prettiness is not a feature. Prettiness is. For most people, it will be more enjoyable, more so if they spend hours each day using the tool, which is more likely in a work environment.
If it's more enjoyable, more people will use it instead of all these non-free pieces of software you listed (and which I will not use as a consequence), which in turn might bring more funding, which might allow the Thunderbird team to make it even more reliable.
Life is there to be enjoyed and this includes work. I also use thunderbird for my personal email account so it's not just work for me, like many people out there.
Why are we even arguing for non-prettiness? This is madness.
Again, the revamping we are talking about is being done for maintainability reasons, which is what you want for your tool to remain efficient, stable and reliable.
I understand the concerns, UI rewrites are often upsetting, but the amount of resistance to change here is quite impressive.
I don't see the point of not wanting improvements. Of course I won't be happy if Thunderbird becomes less reliable or less efficient but we are not there yet.
I trust the Thunderbird team to do the right things. They have not failed me for almost 20 years. I can't use anything else because I'm too used to its UI, the keyboard shortcuts, everything. The first versions after the rewrite might not work very well and have bugs but we can always wait a bit before upgrading.
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.
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.
> 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 line heights and fonts, remove features that most of the user don't need, etc.
A professional tool doesn't need to be pretty. If you go to a plant control room and look at the computer screens they have an interface that looks Windows 95 usually... but that is fine, since they need to be functional, not pretty, they don't need rounded corners, they use high contrast between colours that are ugly from a design point of view but allow to see things easily.
Most email clients are shit. They show you mails in a conversational way that is just wrong, mail are not chats, but letters. They insist on composing HTML mails, instead of plain text ones (like Thunderbird does). And have a very bad UX in general.
Of many things that can improve Thunderbird (for example a better integration with Exchange/Office365 with not only the mail but also the calendar/contacts, sync settings to a Mozilla account, better search in the emails) they focus on the only thing that make most people use Thunderbird.
> I don't see the point of not wanting improvements
I see it. I'm used to a tool, that I use with satisfaction since years. There is no reason why I have to learn to use a new UI or change the way I work because somebody at Mozilla decided that we need a more fancy looking UI. The reason I choose Thunderbird is because other software, such as Outlook, became shit because they followed the same path of modernization that now is following Mozilla.
If something is not broken and users are satisfied with it, why the hell do you want to change it???
By the way, so far I'm happy with the improvements in Thunderbird that Mozilla had done, because having prettier icons and fonts, having the dark theme, are all UI improvements that are purely cosmetics and doesn't change the UX, same shortcuts that I'm used, same mode of operation, I don't have to learn a new thing. Now they decide that the whole UI must be modernized, I don't get it. I will probably stay with the last Thunderbird that will support the current UI for a long time...
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.
I don't think paragonating email clients to houses makes all that much sense. Unless you use them for personal stuff (but most people use mobile phones or webmails for that these days, that to manage 1 personal account it's fine) email clients are a professional tool, used at work.
So it's more correct paragonating them to a factory, where furniture doesn't need to look good but it needs to be functional, safe and reliable.
I'd understand if you just resisted the UI changes. In the video they discuss serious underlying technical debt. Thunderbird is twenty years old now and most of us have technical debt on projects that are a fraction of that age!
I support the revived energy around the Thunderbird project and I trust that they will not betray old and loyal power users. Looking forward to future releases.
Thunderbird sucks, full send. I love free software and I've used TB for ten years because it's bundled with lots of Linux distros. But one paragraph into the post they are making excuses for how bad they are: "Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?"
I'm definitely not complaining about the UI "looking old" - I like UIs that are old, they are simple! But Thunderbird is glitchy, sluggish, and plagued by idiotic design decisions (for example, why the fuck do they make it hard for me to include attachments in a reply? super obvious example of some cranky "principled" programmer who's happy to give the middle finger to Thunderbird's actual users).
We're on TB for one reason - we're too busy to evaluate replacements. If/when we find the time to evaluate other clients we will absolutely replace it. The post stinks of hostility toward their users, which is unfortunately no surprise with Thunderbird.
I'm a long time Thunderbird user. Once every one or two years I looked if there was a better free & libre alternative supporting Windows, having a GUI, and an integrated calendar. Each time I came to the conclusion that Thunderbird was still the top contender. This blog post fills me with hope that Thunderbird has a future.
After all those horror stories of people getting locked out of Google, I started using Thunderbird as my email backup. Took a while to get all my emails but now that they have been downloaded, I just run it as a backup tool to fetch the emails. If I had to ask, more than improving the UI (which is an initiative I have nothing against), improving the performance (mainly search) should be accorded high priority.
Yeah, same, except on my home file server (unraid) rather than my desktop.
I use https://hub.docker.com/r/ich777/thunderbird, which exposes the UI as a website with a javascript version of vnc. I log into it every once in a while to verify that it's still fetching updates.
The Future of Thunderbird can only be summarized as having no future with Mozilla.
> Throughout the years, Mozilla’s focus shifted a lot, investing less and less resources into the development of Thunderbird. On July 6, 2012, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would no longer be focused on innovations for Thunderbird, and that the future Thunderbird development would transition to a community-driven model.
So it isn't a priority and isn't as interesting to Mozilla? As far as Mozilla is concerned; it is dead. This also happened to Servo and it ended up getting severed from Mozilla, since they see it as another cost they cannot maintain.
> In 2023, Thunderbird is pretty well sustainable, with a healthy donation flow, more services in development to increase our revenue stream (stay tuned!)
IOW, for most UI designers on current software products.
Very few changes I see these days actually improve anything; they are merely change for the sake of providing evidence to justify the UI designers' salaries.
If something already works, and we know how to use it, there had better be a damn good reason for changing it, because you are burdening thousands, millions, or even billions of people with yet another entirely unnecessary learning task in our already over-stressed lives.
We are far past the time when the new version of X will be seen by orders of magnitude more users than the previous version, so it'll be only the minority that have to relearn, and the majority will enjoy the improved UI (assuming that the new stuff is actually an improvement; BIG assumption). Today, most of it will burden existing users.
You want to make the colors prettier, add a dark/night mode, round the corners, highlight things a bit better? Wonderful. Just don't mess with the organization.
And don't mess with discoverability and ergonomics. I hate buttons that don't look like buttons, controls littering the title bar so that I can't use it to move the window, etc etc
Also for the users. For my part, I appreciate if stuff looks modern. I understand the whitespace madness complaints, but a software which looks like 1999 is not something I want to work with.
There is a degree of modern style needed because Thunderbird does not exist in a vacuum. Windows evolved, macOS evolved, iPhone/Android look different than 1997 Windows .. which Thunderbird looked like the last years.
Meanwhile, the only major website my elderly dad, who didn't really start using the Web until something like 2015, can use unassisted with a fair amount of confidence, is Craigslist.
I'm skeptical that normal, non-technical users actually benefit from or even prefer all this crap. Someone does, but I'm not convinced it's them.
Ok, but whilst you wear your clothes out in front of people (a literal fashion show), few people parade their MUA's UI in front of their friends, do they? Like, get check the chrome in my mail program guys...??
I mostly read HN on my iPhone using the website with the zoom cranked up a little bit and I find it works better than the variety of native clients available.
It's better than the average news site but worse than if they just spent 10 minutes adding some mobile CSS. I constantly log out accidentally on mobile.
HN is one of the best web sites for my phone. There are some improvements they could make but I would not call being among the top 5% best mobile websites being "really bad".
I will take overloaded any day of the week. I am sick of the trend of removing all widgets for some sense of a clean interface. I am on a desktop machine with a ginormous amount of pixels and real-estate. Show me all the buttons.
I think it's the UI an email client must have, no less, no more. I quote the post
> A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially implemented with version 115 in July, aiming at offering a simple and clean interface for “new” users, as well as the implementation of more customizable options with a flexible and adaptable interface to allow “old” users to maintain that familiarity they love.
I don't understand why today's new users shouldn't be able to cope with an interface any old new user didn't have any problem using. However as long as they keep the promise not to take away the current convenient interface, they can do whatever they feel like to remove functionality for a dumb modern mode.
Well tbh I didn't realize that Thunderbird had an Android release. Looks to be about a year old? That's super new in the history of Thunderbird, and I don't know anything about how it works.
If there's no theming support, then yeah, at minimum a dark mode is a totally reasonable request.
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.
I bet you can go on Slashdot and find a thread from a million years ago with people saying they will never switch to this trendy new Thunderbird and that you can pull their pine/elm/mutt from their cold dead hands. I remember a time when running X11 with twm and an xterm was considered too fancy
On the other hand, I gave thunderbird a try after switching to linux and found their UI so bad that it was harming usability. After the app had finished taking up the screen with various controls, settings and the list of messages, there was a tiny window left over to read the email itself, and it seemed like the threading of messages was basically broken. It wasn't that it looked old exactly that bothered me (although it did), but that I was buried in a mountain of jank from the start.
I quickly found a new client, but not one I love. If thunderbird does get a UI overhaul I'd give them another chance, and it sounds like they're moving towards a UI that I at the very least would prefer.
A big part of the problem is that the people in charge of TB UI are basically anti-application, and want everything to look like a pretentious web page or a mobile phone app page. A lot of TB's usable UI has already been spoiled by such changes.
It would be nice if they could work with Proton to get an integrated mail/calendar solution in place. Not a huge fan of the daemon I have to run to sync Thunderbird with Protonmail.
email "protocol" is clunky and old AF. no need to build an email client for the 21st century when everything underneath it a donkey pulling a cart full of rotten fish. stmp/pop/imap and all the dkip.. is pure crap. we need to overhaul the entire email/messaging delivery system. not just the face of it.
Webmail is a nice option to have if you want it. Email should continue to be a separate set of protocols targeted at that one application. I'd much rather see webmail disappear as an option than standard email servers and clients.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadThere's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!
The whole calendaring system is written in javascript.
The chat clients (irc, matrix, etc) are also written in javascript.
If it works...
Compared to eg. gmail (web interface), i find the speeds comparable, with the added benefit of having my emails offline (too).
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 literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.
Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI.
But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"
It doesn't fix the age old default search output, but it works comparably well for my taste. It also doesn't fix the idle CPU usage unfortunately.
[1] https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable
I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...
I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware.
I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk.
Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORqed8SW_7fPnPdjfz42RoGf... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1446335 https://arewexblstill.com/
I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.
People delete email?
I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.
(Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)
What is the advantage of the archive, if you have to rely on search to find stuff anyway?
This lets you turn the inbox into a sort of TODO list that only shows you stuff that's still pending. Of course you also have to use filters aggressively if you wanna maintain inbox-zero without having to manually archive every "your bank statement is ready" email.
If they're basically stacked on top of 90% of firefox (which is how I understand it to work), then it's not necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top of a framework that gets bloated.
But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102).
Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.
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 user.
I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.
The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to be sitting idle.
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 new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.
It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.
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 market leader. That annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.
Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure that there will be more new users faster than old users leaving. If it doesn't work out, chances are that they ain't coming back.
I can't say anything about keeping TB open and having it steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail. Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht shouldn't create problems, however.
I believe there are settings you can run that might create more problems with performance but I haven't touched anything the last 5 years so can't say what it was any more.
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...
So why would anyone use Firefox over chrome?
Because it is open source? Sure, but so is Chromium. But both seem to have mostly cathedral-style development and someone outside of Mozilla is unlikely to be able to influence the direction of the project in any meaningful way. It's open source software but not an open source project. User feedback is continuously ignored, often with the only argument being developer convenience.
Because of a focus on privacy? While they do like to push that angle in their marketing and in some ways do more to prevent websites from tracking you they show little concern for making the browser itself respect your privacy with opt out telemetry, eperiments, in-browser advertising and more. Again, any user pushback is summarily dismissed.
The only remaining advantage are some niche features here and there. And those are often provided by extension whose API Mozilla limits more and more.
So I still use Firefox but its only because it is the lesser evil, and the differrence is shrinking. I certainly don't trust Mozilla's autoupdates and won't use upstream builds. Thankfully Linux distros still provide a last defense layer - but that we need that layer at all for something that is supposed to be an open browser is ridiculous. I don't fault anyone who says fuck it and just uses Chrome so that ALL sites work out of the box.
That wouldn't have gained them appreciable new users, but it would have slowed losses. Almost all my browsing is done in Chrome and Brave now. There's not really any reason to use Firefox besides habit now, and I don't, except on my desktop.
Mozilla somehow failed to recognize their entire core userbase was power users and Firefox fans, which relentlessly evangelized the product to other people, going around installing it on grandma's computer.
Then they failed to recognize that while Chrome was a comparable technical product, maybe even slightly better in some ways, the reason for its success it because it was relentlessly shilled by a huge megacorporation that pushed it in advertising, on the world's biggest web properties, and even had it packaged in installers for other products.
Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Chrome by assuming that "if we were just more like Chrome, people would use us", or "we need to make a browser for grandma." Grandma doesn't download browsers. That is, unless a big banner comes up on YouTube telling her she needs to download Chrome for the best experience. By alienating its core "fanbase" or whatever you want to call it, by alienating its power users, Firefox alienated the only demographic it ever had an actual shot with. Unless you count the even-smaller real-open-source-only-we-need-web-freedom demographic.
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.
And that risks doing absolute horseshit. Outlook's new UI for example hides the cc/bcc behind an additional click, extremely annoying for anyone but personal mail usage. How MS still haven't managed to discover and fix that with their billions of corporate users is astonishing.
Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an already running browser is faster than starting a web browser albatross afresh.
Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes well.
Wouldn't that only make sense if your Gmail tab wasn't also loading up the same CSS?
My issues were:
I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!It seems that Thunderbird supports O365 oauth natively now, including access to calendars.
I know I had to use some plugins in the past, but now, it just works.
* https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbir...
If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.
Signatures are a pain.
Since its deprecation and Thunderbird's integration of GPG, there were a few hiccups (mostly UI differences between Enigmail and native TB support), but none with key management.
I can generate, store and use keys without issue.
Condolences on having to use O365, BTW.
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
It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."
But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.
Maybe it's because I only use POP/SMTP accounts?
Uses %1.5 of my 32G of RAM and 0.2% CPU. I'm running on Linux, but I do not see the performance issues others are having.
You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.
Discord, Teams, Firefox, and Slack all seem to use 0-0.1% without much interaction (though I am typing into Firefox right now!) - Thunderbird seems to be 0% more often than not.
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.
But.. it seems like a solveable problem..
I can't complain about performance. My profile folder is ~90 GB. I have multiple email accounts connected and a large local folder which contains email from Google Takeout since I had to delete some (larger) emails from my Google mail to make space. That being said, it would be nice to not see application not responding messages on Fedora (Gnome) as much.
Same here, been running it for years, it even runs and looks great on my oldest (10 years old) machine.
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.
The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.
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?
How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?
Many are just notifications from GitHub from 7-year-ago employers since leaving an org does not (did not?) unsubscribe you.
Others are build logs which are useful to keep around for searching and so forth.
Typically I just let my mail provider sort them for me.
For some reason on Linux it was fine in Windows it was literally unusable. Particularly when composing a message of all things.
There’s definitely some quirks somewhere.
I switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use.
Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.
I originally switched from Apple mail because I thought Apple mail could not handle my gmail.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en
I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.
If Thunderbird was easy to develop and modify then all the performance issues you're talking about would be resolved.
The problem is that Thunderbird's legacy code base makes making changes extremely difficult, slow and risky.
And that's Thunderbird's fundamental problem as the article describes well.
https://jmap.io/
the industrial strength, bullet proof, complex but profoundly reliable engineering within Apple Mail shows itself to have stability over decades.
Why is this Thunderbird rewrite going to succeed ? A glossy sales pitch makes it less convincing, not more. This is a years' long project with no guranteed outcomes.. in fact, I would suspect that noveau security trappings and trend-based GUI embellishments would almost guarantee a "mayfly life" at great expense, contrasted to the Oak trees of original Internet standards.
cynical? perhaps.. prove it wrong
unlike the reliable and standards-based clients on Windows, you mean?
I spent a lot of time in the anti-phishing/anti-fraud world. During a stint at dmarcian I wrote up an entire proposal that I titled A.P.E.C.S. - Anti-Phishing Email Client Standards. I should probably publish this document at some point since it looks like they've since taken it down and IMO, it still needs to happen.
When you dive hard into the email security problem you quickly discover that there are layers to how end users are exploited.
- Sending Mail Servers
- Receiving Mail Servers
- Information presented to users in the mail client
- Links and attachments in the emails themselves
- The phishing sites they link to
Each layer of this process needs to be addressed. DMARC let's sending mail servers verify that they are actually allowed to send email on behalf of the domain. That alone is a huge scope of the problem and puts the domain owner in charge of preventing abuse from their own domain.
Receiving mail servers have a number of factors that they use to verify inbound emails and DMARC makes that process a lot easier, but you still have to have spam filters, virus scans, IP and sender reputation management, reverse DNS lookups. The tools supporting users here are always getting better but they won't ever be perfect.
The mail client itself is critical though. We know the filters aren't perfect and typically have to err on the side of deliverability, which means that users are going to see messages that the mail server thought were questionable. You're already seeing warning messages in Google for things like this, but the factors here can absolutely be standardized around a number of factors. Users don't respond to "you can trust this" indicators (studies show, don't have them handy) but they do respond to warnings as long as the warnings are very targeted and rare. If you get a warning about every message, it's going to get ignored.
Links and attachments are also in the mail client scope. Attachment scans and link reputation absolutely need to be a part of the scope of this problem. There's an opportunity for link trust to be standardized in the same way as dmarc. Does the URL match the DMARC sender? Cool, that's a really good sign. Is the URL going through a shortener or other tracking system? In that case, there's probably a lot more risk involved. In order to bypass filters, shorteners will link to something safe and then change the redirect target after successful delivery. Reputation scores need to be tracked on shorteners based on immutability of links and responsiveness to abuse take downs. If they don't, then those services should generate a giant warning in the email client and potentially even have the link disabled in the message.
Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who's linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped.
That's the high level. The standards are needed and should be applied across every email client vendor, from Thunderbird to Gmail to Outlook/365 to Fastmail to Apple. IMO Thunderbird has an opportunity to lead the charge here and become a force that protects people from phishing at the point of consumption, regardless of the rules on the mail server itself.
I'd be interested in seeing it. It sounds like a pretty good idea. It's incredible to me how effective even the worst phishing email/sites are and to me that's an indication that not enough is being done to point out clear warning signs to users.
> Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who's linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped.
The URL shorteners can be the worst. They don't seem to care who creates a link to something, and don't do even basic checking of whats at the other end. You'd think a person creating a link to yet another URL shortener would set off major flags, but they don't seem to care.
Same with survey/form sites that keep being hijacked for phishing purposes. They don't bother with even basic checking for scams either. If someone creates a form with a password field that'd be easy to flag for review, but it doesn't happen. I can report a bunch of identical phishing sites that were created with URLs like: random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname001
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname002
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname003
and while they'll generally take them down, they'll do nothing to prevent:
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname004
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname005
random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname006
from being created. Not checking for targetcompanyname in the url of new forms/surveys, and not bothering to check to see if the 12 new sites someone just created are identical to the last 12 they were asked to disable.
Anything that can be done to help make those sites less attractive to users before they even click the link in the email they got would really help.
I do hope the redesign considers add-on developers. A lot have been abandoned by their maintainers who become frustrated with keeping up with Thunderbird's changes. One thing I'd love to see is an easy way to send money to support add-on creators.
It's probably the worst of all email clients we've tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can't find emails when searching for a name. It's so bad.
There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).
The actual search that works "okay" if when you right click on a folder and select 'Search Messages'. Sorry if you know this already, but I didn't know and it's so much better searching through this interface as opposed to the other two.
Is there a capable alternative to Microsoft's Outlook client, that has good translation of emails built in? This is for Windows.
Outlook is so slow, and it opens a small side pane for translation. It has a horrible UI.
> …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience.
Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" really never stops giving.
You don't actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workforce -- someone has to coordinate all that, or else what you're going to get is a mess, both under the hood and in what is visible. And coordinating all that is hard and resource-intensive, the more so the _more_ developers involved.
Some open source projects manage to do that coordination with a decentralized volunteer coordinating staff (although in many cases, it's not truly "volunteer", it's people being paid by various employers collaborating across organizations/employers -- this was in fact most of original open source success stories). But it's not easy. And requires stability and tenure in that decentralized coordinating staff, to hold the vision, and to have the relationships to work together in a unified way. (A "benevolent dictator" is another way to do it).
The hardest part of developing software that is too much for one person to do by themselves (and that one person never leaves), is always the inter-personal communication, coordination, and shared-mental-model-making-and-sharing, not the coding.
So anyway, without being involved in Thunderbird at all, I totally believe this story, and that bringing it back into an organization of paid employees as a core was necessary to prevent complete disintegration (I mean, other organizational solutions are possible too, but they are all even more challenging, this is the simplest), because... that's how it works.
i don't think that vision can be developed and maintained succesfully only by people who never get their hands dirty, it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.
There's a danger here too in that you can iterate on a design in a "monolithic" way where you iterate over a brittle design that's still hard to work with years later because you need to reload the entire system into your brain to make sense of it again.
Looking at Unix as an open source design success story, it was designed in relatively well-defined "layers". So for example it can get away with making literally everything a "file" with a common file interface, even if you're actually working with a physical peripheral or a "black hole" like /dev/null. And on these layers you can build all kinds of different implementations.
I try to push for a similar approach even on proprietary projects because if we can compartmentalize what we need to know to work with the pieces of our systems, they'll be easier to understand with less effort than if we need to understand everything about them before iterating on them.
And this can be passively "encouraged" by how the work is divided across teams/workgroups to leverage Conway's Law (which can also just as easily lead to software components that don't make any engineering sense if people aren't conscious of the effect their organization has on their software's organization).
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit
[1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
"Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Web)"
Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.
Either way, Gecko is what renders XUL and HTML, and therefore Thunderbird. It's essentially a big chunk of web stuff. It has always been this way.
Though I think Gecko is a tad more memory efficient than Chromium / Electron, and a lot nicer to use than your average Electron app.
And I'm pretty certain Thunderbird is staying this way. Becoming an Electron app would be a huge rewrite, and I think Thunderbird devs like Gecko. They say it in the blog post. It's not happening.
Are the people who want it to change confused about the difference between smtp and http?
And as a mail client you'd better follow the security fixes of the web engine you are using.
I guess not everyone is willing to use an old web engine derived from an old version of Word and maintain this thing for the eternity.
Though I would not mind some refresh. Many (younger? and as young as me, actually) people who are used to webmails and mobile apps find it ugly, and I can see that.
The world is missing a fast and efficient desktop mail client that looks good and I'd be glad if Thunderbird were it.
There's a world in which the Thunderbird team understands they have a huge number of long time users and they should be careful to keep it usable for them, where they will take feedback and in which they build something that doesn't suck for people who don't now it yet, and this world could be ours.
Wait and see? I understand the concern and that many people are worried, I also don't quite like the trend of UIs with a lot of space lacking contrast everywhere, but I think a good outcome is actually likely.
It's not like it's easy. It crossed my mind a few years ago, actually. But why should I when the email client I actually happen to use decided to actually rebuild its interface? I'm not the one who is unhappy, I'm happy either way actually, I could answer "go fork Thunderbird if you are not happy".
There was an interesting talk at FOSDEM by OpenProject on how to handle UI revamps [1], there are ways to do it without breaking current users. I recommend it, I'm quite picky on presentations but this one was really good and I enjoyed it.
I agree that UI stability is important. UI stability is not the only important thing. Responsiveness indeed too. I hate slow UIs. Consistency with what users are used to (from the rest of the world) is very important too.
What's more, I read in the blog post that they are rebuilding the UI from scratch, but what I don't read is that they decided to change everything.
They can do it right. I can't say they will, but… again, let's see? I'm sure they'd be glad to receive feedback, questions and concerns.
Am I the only one enthusiastic about some potential Thunderbird UI revamp here?
I don't like many UI/UX choices on the current web, but I also like what KDE has been doing, and maybe Gnome too, there are places where UIs get better! Why not Thunderbird?
[1] https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/practical_ux_at_openp...
In modern software "UI revamp" means turning muscle memory into papercuts.
Mozilla can rebuild the UI without redesigning it. If they need to throw out underlying code to improve performance or maintainability that's fine. But changing UI elements is like renaming a boat. You just don't do it.
Apart from the attach button that was put at the other side of the compose window. That was annoying.
I fully expect the new UI to have a mode resembling the current one and the current keyboard shortcuts to still work. Now, if it's not the case I'll agree with you.
I too am pretty pissed off by many UI revamps and modern web UIs in general, but I'm quite confident because Thunderbird is not your regular shitty web app powered by a horde of investors.
We will see.
I worked in one of these and it was the best office space ever. Built into a nature preserve. There were paths along the water between the buildings. Everyone had an office with a window and view of trees and water. It was dated but I had zero complaints. We got bought by a company in Silicon Valley and they moved us to an "open office" in what was essentially a warehouse. Fancy new furniture and desks, none of it better than what we already had. Attractive but uncomfortable. The development team was placed next to sales, which is about as loud as an elementary school at recess. It was horrible. The only view was of a retaining wall in the parking lot. Nothing about it was better. Even the HVAC was worse.
Okay, that's a tangent, but if done well, new buildings should be better because we improved on many plans.
At the campus in which I studied, 70s buildings are mostly ugly and badly isolated (done quickly all at the same time because they were needed quickly, standards of back then, also fairly solid). Cold in winter, hot in summer, quite dark inside overall at least for the corridors.
They did a decent job for the new buildings. Rooms still have the same number of people. Those buildings are rented for 30 years costing a lot to the university but they are better overall.
So, yeah. In both cases, new stuff can be better but of course it needs to be well done, stuff that matter need to be there and users listened.
Of client that have the UI/UX of Thunderbird... well only Thunderbird remained. I get that if you use the email sporadically with only one account, you are better with a client like you described, but at that point you can as well use a webmail.
Otherwise if you work with emails, and you manage tens or hundreds of email each day, Thunderbird interface is great, is compact, is essential, is functional. Not pretty, but works well, it's stable, it's reliable.
Thunderbird is a work tool, and a work tool to me doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work.
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 efficient.
I agree with the pros you find to the UI of Thunderbird and that's why I use it. But non-prettiness is not a feature. Prettiness is. For most people, it will be more enjoyable, more so if they spend hours each day using the tool, which is more likely in a work environment.
If it's more enjoyable, more people will use it instead of all these non-free pieces of software you listed (and which I will not use as a consequence), which in turn might bring more funding, which might allow the Thunderbird team to make it even more reliable.
Life is there to be enjoyed and this includes work. I also use thunderbird for my personal email account so it's not just work for me, like many people out there.
Why are we even arguing for non-prettiness? This is madness.
Again, the revamping we are talking about is being done for maintainability reasons, which is what you want for your tool to remain efficient, stable and reliable.
I understand the concerns, UI rewrites are often upsetting, but the amount of resistance to change here is quite impressive.
I don't see the point of not wanting improvements. Of course I won't be happy if Thunderbird becomes less reliable or less efficient but we are not there yet.
I trust the Thunderbird team to do the right things. They have not failed me for almost 20 years. I can't use anything else because I'm too used to its UI, the keyboard shortcuts, everything. The first versions after the rewrite might not work very well and have bugs but we can always wait a bit before upgrading.
A UI revamp is like coming home to a crime scene, or at least a messy kitchen.
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.
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 line heights and fonts, remove features that most of the user don't need, etc.
A professional tool doesn't need to be pretty. If you go to a plant control room and look at the computer screens they have an interface that looks Windows 95 usually... but that is fine, since they need to be functional, not pretty, they don't need rounded corners, they use high contrast between colours that are ugly from a design point of view but allow to see things easily.
Most email clients are shit. They show you mails in a conversational way that is just wrong, mail are not chats, but letters. They insist on composing HTML mails, instead of plain text ones (like Thunderbird does). And have a very bad UX in general.
Of many things that can improve Thunderbird (for example a better integration with Exchange/Office365 with not only the mail but also the calendar/contacts, sync settings to a Mozilla account, better search in the emails) they focus on the only thing that make most people use Thunderbird.
> I don't see the point of not wanting improvements
I see it. I'm used to a tool, that I use with satisfaction since years. There is no reason why I have to learn to use a new UI or change the way I work because somebody at Mozilla decided that we need a more fancy looking UI. The reason I choose Thunderbird is because other software, such as Outlook, became shit because they followed the same path of modernization that now is following Mozilla.
If something is not broken and users are satisfied with it, why the hell do you want to change it???
By the way, so far I'm happy with the improvements in Thunderbird that Mozilla had done, because having prettier icons and fonts, having the dark theme, are all UI improvements that are purely cosmetics and doesn't change the UX, same shortcuts that I'm used, same mode of operation, I don't have to learn a new thing. Now they decide that the whole UI must be modernized, I don't get it. I will probably stay with the last Thunderbird that will support the current UI for a long time...
So it's more correct paragonating them to a factory, where furniture doesn't need to look good but it needs to be functional, safe and reliable.
I support the revived energy around the Thunderbird project and I trust that they will not betray old and loyal power users. Looking forward to future releases.
I'm definitely not complaining about the UI "looking old" - I like UIs that are old, they are simple! But Thunderbird is glitchy, sluggish, and plagued by idiotic design decisions (for example, why the fuck do they make it hard for me to include attachments in a reply? super obvious example of some cranky "principled" programmer who's happy to give the middle finger to Thunderbird's actual users).
We're on TB for one reason - we're too busy to evaluate replacements. If/when we find the time to evaluate other clients we will absolutely replace it. The post stinks of hostility toward their users, which is unfortunately no surprise with Thunderbird.
I use https://hub.docker.com/r/ich777/thunderbird, which exposes the UI as a website with a javascript version of vnc. I log into it every once in a while to verify that it's still fetching updates.
I used to use imapbackup but I wouldn't say they are better tools:
- They rarely support OAUTH directly so it can be a pain to set up with gmail
- You still need a viewer to navigate the backup when you need it (usually a full mail client though there are some lighter maildir frontends)
> Throughout the years, Mozilla’s focus shifted a lot, investing less and less resources into the development of Thunderbird. On July 6, 2012, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would no longer be focused on innovations for Thunderbird, and that the future Thunderbird development would transition to a community-driven model.
So it isn't a priority and isn't as interesting to Mozilla? As far as Mozilla is concerned; it is dead. This also happened to Servo and it ended up getting severed from Mozilla, since they see it as another cost they cannot maintain.
> In 2023, Thunderbird is pretty well sustainable, with a healthy donation flow, more services in development to increase our revenue stream (stay tuned!)
Thank you Google!
UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.
Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.
Very few changes I see these days actually improve anything; they are merely change for the sake of providing evidence to justify the UI designers' salaries.
If something already works, and we know how to use it, there had better be a damn good reason for changing it, because you are burdening thousands, millions, or even billions of people with yet another entirely unnecessary learning task in our already over-stressed lives.
We are far past the time when the new version of X will be seen by orders of magnitude more users than the previous version, so it'll be only the minority that have to relearn, and the majority will enjoy the improved UI (assuming that the new stuff is actually an improvement; BIG assumption). Today, most of it will burden existing users.
You want to make the colors prettier, add a dark/night mode, round the corners, highlight things a bit better? Wonderful. Just don't mess with the organization.
And don't mess with discoverability and ergonomics. I hate buttons that don't look like buttons, controls littering the title bar so that I can't use it to move the window, etc etc
There is a degree of modern style needed because Thunderbird does not exist in a vacuum. Windows evolved, macOS evolved, iPhone/Android look different than 1997 Windows .. which Thunderbird looked like the last years.
I'm skeptical that normal, non-technical users actually benefit from or even prefer all this crap. Someone does, but I'm not convinced it's them.
*I send emails in plaintext, don't tell me about S/MIME.
So they could keep the good old HN alive for PCs.
> A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially implemented with version 115 in July, aiming at offering a simple and clean interface for “new” users, as well as the implementation of more customizable options with a flexible and adaptable interface to allow “old” users to maintain that familiarity they love.
I don't understand why today's new users shouldn't be able to cope with an interface any old new user didn't have any problem using. However as long as they keep the promise not to take away the current convenient interface, they can do whatever they feel like to remove functionality for a dumb modern mode.
If there's no theming support, then yeah, at minimum a dark mode is a totally reasonable request.
edit: or were you talking about HN?
Old reddit + RES is entirely better in every regard. New reddit is utter garbage tho.
By the time it was renamed Thunderbird, Netcraft had already confirmed /. was dead. Now get off my lawn!
I quickly found a new client, but not one I love. If thunderbird does get a UI overhaul I'd give them another chance, and it sounds like they're moving towards a UI that I at the very least would prefer.