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Mozilla Thunderbird Gets Firefox-style Tabs
daria42 writes "A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers." From the article: "It is unlikely the feature will be found in Mozilla's imminent release of Thunderbird 1.5 -- currently in testing -- but software developer Myk Melez has put test versions of Thunderbird online with the tabbed browsing feature included. However, there are doubts over the suitability of these downloads for production use as they are based on bleeding-edge 'unofficial' code. "
I'm all for new features but can't really see a use case for this one. You can already switch between emails at the touch of a button, and unlike modern internet browsing you're almost working with multiple mail windows at once (and with email I presume you'd never tab over to another screen while waiting for a page to render, which is one of the main attractions of tabs for me). There also isn't a compelling need to auto-launch your favorite twelve emails when you open Thunderbird so you can, uh, re-read them again, like you would add your news sites to a tab-group in a browser.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I cannot quite see how this would help (tabbed browsing is easy to see the benefits), tabs for the sake of tabs seems pointless.
After using Lotus (not by choice) I have grown quite fond of tabbed emails. It can be a real convienance when you need to have several emails open and don't want new windows for each as it will get cluttery. Just like with many web pages when it was a pretabed browsing world.
Evolution or ID?
One Use I could see for this (maybe) is with an rss feed or newsgroup reader. You could have each topic in the rss feed open in a seperate tab. For a newsgroup, you could get each thread in a seperate tab.
But for regular email? I don't open multiple email windows in thunderbird and never really had a desire to. So why would I need tabs?
There are only two comments above my threshold right now and both are negative, however, if you've tried the Opera email client you will know that tabs are a good thing. Email tabs are not quite as useful as web browser tabs, but they are equally as good as file manager tabs (Konqueror, anyone?).
Since I've switched from Opera to Kmail for my email it's the one thing I've missed. Don't knock it until you try it. With any luck, Thunderbird tabs will be implemented as well as Opera tabs.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
This is a good idea. I often finding myself futzing with windows so I can display two emails at the same time.
Now, if you could use thunderbird to filter out a person in usenet and replies to his post without taking out the entire thread, that would be cool too.
I wish they'd get the basic features developed first - before implementing all this gold plating. I still cannot filter imap messages based on text in the body. I can do this with outlook, evolution, pine, to name a few ...
Agreed. When I right-click on a tab, I want an option to convert the tab to a new window. And I should be able to turn a window into a tab of another window. The latter is trickier, especially if you allow multiple applications in the same tab set. That implies tabs would be part of the window frame, and go above the application-specific menubar toolbar etc.
I.e. a window containing multiple tabs is logically multiple windows only one of which is visible at a time, and that are stacked on top of each other like a "deck".
- Skinnable themes: +1
- Replication: +1
- Forms: +1
- F5 = refresh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H LOG OUT: -1,000,000
----------------Total: -999,997
Nope, sorry, still sucks.
Is something burning?
Oh, it's my karma.