Slashdot Mirror
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. "
Hey, if you drink enough thunderbird, everything has tabs, man...
Link
It's Lotus Notes! *shudder*
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.
From the article it looks like they have replaced the preview pane with tabbed email views.
That looks like it would be confusing - especially if the list above doesn't tally with which email is visible.
I cannot quite see how this would help (tabbed browsing is easy to see the benefits), tabs for the sake of tabs seems pointless.
liqbase
Notes has had tabs for a very long time. It's nice to see that other people think that is a usefull feature.
Supplies!
The only thing I would like to se (and it is prolly there, but I just haven't looked for it) is heirarchical email display. Instead of showing me messages, show me entire threads as a single entity. Also, clean it up and make it look nice. That would be a greater asset.
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?
From the related links: "Compare prices on Mozilla". Compare prices on free software? Are CoolTechZone running the ads on here?
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.
Any plans to release this as an extension?
We have Lotus Notes at work. It is not uncommon for me to have more than two messages open at once, each under its own tab. Even my reply is under its own tab. Another example of a good use, I am reading an involved message and an urgent one comes to my attention. Open the new one in its tab and leaving the other's display undisturbed.
Bringing OSS applications up to the level of current business applications is key to gaining acceptance. As with any other feature it should be selectable. Now there are many OSS packages that have features I would love to see in the commercial applications I use by feature movement is much easier one way than the other.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Who can I complain to if Firefox screws me
Do you really think that you can complain to MS when IE screws you?
The best of luck, my poor deluded friend.
hehe
You think you can complain to Microsoft and they will actually DO something about it? They haven't had a new browser in 5 years. What makes you think they'll listen to your complaints and make a move?
Mozilla is an open-source product with huge community support. You're MUCH more likely to get a change-request addressed or bug-report fixed in Firefox than you are with Internet Explorer.
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 like Thunderbird. But ever since those guys from Google made GMail, I can't imagine being tied to a desktop mail client.
I believe a web-based interface accessible from anywhere is the inevitable winner in e-mail clients. Just like Linux will inevitably be on all computers, eventually.
Yes, Lotus Notes had it. Lotus notes also had a lot of things. Like syphillis. It's a good feature - the fact that it was pioneered on a stupid, stupid program is beside the point.
I'm just wondering when better newsgroup browsing is coming. Last time I used T-bird for newsgroups I found it just as cumbersome as OE.
One of the big items I miss at home. While the Lotus system sucks big time at work, (poor IT management) this is one of the few items that I love about Lotus.
After using linux for over ten years, Mozilla is the best thing that happened to FOSS.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
There are different reasons for tabs:
1) so you can centralize your web-browsing experience. i.e. so browsing doesn't take up your entire taskbar and you can easily switch to your (tabbed) IM window, etc. Just like virtual desktops/workspaces. Email is on workspace 2, browsing/IM on workspace 1, music on workspace 3, work on workspace 4. (I use them in a square so email is above work, so the left column is play and the right is work.)
2) Some people consider tabs like a pile -- you go to news.google.com and you middle-click to open all of the stories you'd like to read in tabs. that way you don't have to bother with them (since a new tab loads in the background) and they are ready for you when you are finished with the first article and you close that tab.
I mix the two. I rarely have more than one browser window open, unless a second (or third) window is meant for an explicit purpose -- like if i'm researching a particular topic. And I'm glad I use firefox. I currently have about 25 tabs open. I wouldn't want to have to deal with that many windows.
And to answer one of your questions, when you hover over a tab it tells you the title of the website. This isn't needed, though, when you don't have so many that you can still read the title in the tab.
And as for a multi-billion dollar company backing it? Then I guess you never use new products from anything but the most well-established companies.
A parallel can be drawn with GNU/linux systems. When I started using linux in 1996 there were already companies supporting it. I have no doubt that as corperations adopt gecko-based solutions they will either start offering support themselves or some other kind of support structure will pop up.
I think you're thinking about free software falsely, though. I trust popular free software because I trust that there is a large enough section of the tech-proficient population that is good that I can trust them to poke through the code. The population that gets to deal with IE's code is much smaller, so the chance of there being a decently sized ethical population among them is much smaller.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
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 ...
I use Gmail. Is there any reason I should go to the effort of configuring Thunderbird to pop3 into my Gmail account when the webmail interface is good enough? I used to use Thunderbird to post to Usenet, but Google is better for that too - it's easier to see replies to your posts using Google than Thunderbird (where there's apparantly no way of doing this except for clicking on your `sent` folder, then looking at the subject line and Usenet group, then locating those, looking for your post.... then back to your sent folder to start the whole process again for your second post etc etc. Google will send you an email when a string occurs in a post to Usenet, and the email contains a link to the post - couldn't be simpler).
Also, it's tedious to configure Thunderbird to talk to an ISP - you have to fuck about with port numbers and user names etc and I frequently forget whether username (for instance) includes or excludes the part of my email address left of the @.
Browser identification only happens once an HTTP connection has been made. If you're not connecting to the server, it's not because of which browser you're using.
:)
More likely, it's slashdotted and configured to reject connections when under too high a load.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Plus, with windows IE, I have a billion dollar company standing behind my product. Who can I complain to if Firefox screws me.
You're so right. I mean, over the last five years, the billion dollar company has released so many updates to its browser, while Firefox has more or less been standing still. Clearly, the billion dollar company cared more about their product than those hippies at Mozilla. In fact, I care about IE as much as Microsoft does.
Je ne parle pas francais.
And the feature was annoying and cluttery. Something like the standard Outlook Express/Thunderbird setup, but with tags, is perfect.
Well, he can complain to MS :)
Whether the complaint will be thrown to the garbage or positively processed is a different matter.
homepage: www.tls.pl
signature: not found
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".
Your "tabs" in Internet Explorer are only available on the Window's platform. For those of us that use Apple's OS X or Linux the Window's task bar is not going to cut it. In addition I usually have 11 - 20 tabs open that reference various API documentation. Having 11-20 windows open can really clutter a desktop so even when I have to lower my standards and use a Windows workstation, I prefer to use Firefox tabbing to reduce the clutter from multiple open windows.
Why not have a second IE window open? At the bottom of windows you have the taskbar, you can tab from there.
The taskbar is for applications. When I have 10-15 browser sessions open, very quickly I either can't quickly "tab" to my other open apps, or all of my Internet Explorer windows are lumped together into the same taskbar item (depending on my settings) defeating the purpose entirely.
Also with Firefox I can middle click a link and it opens in a new tab without focus. This means I can do a google search and middle click all of the items that appear relevant without losing my origional google search. I can do this with new windows in IE by right clicking, but this is less convienient and the new windows steals the focus. New tabs also open much quicker than new windows.
I can then run down the tabs and as I encounter sites that really weren't relevent, I can middle click the tab to close it and be done.
Not to mention that I can drag and drop tabs to reorganize them.