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Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla will be announcing next week that they will effectively be taking away resources from Thunderbird's development. Mozilla believes it's better for the developers behind the open-source e-mail client to work on other projects, i.e. Firefox OS. They claim they will not be outright stopping Thunderbird." You can also read the letter at pastebin.
Boy was that leaked fast. I've been using thunderbird for years and never have had much trouble with the mail client. Its pretty stable. Probably won't hurt anything to temporarily take resources off of it. But I hope they don't discontinue it entirely. I feel its way better than Outlook.
And tell them to go find something else to work on. Firefox is officially trash now, never used thunderbird (but I don't know anyone else that does either so whatever) and I know I for wont be touching firefox os after seeing how bad the browser platform has gotten in the last couple years.
Firefox is the least ram hungry browser available! Chrome and even IE 9 last year kicked Firefox 4 ass in on a silver platter. However, the quality is considerable better for their browser at least.
I installed FF 3.6 on a machine to test something and it was PAINFUL and slow to scroll and ram and disk hungry. I was so used to it for so long I forgot about what made Chrome so special in 2009 - 2011 when people started using it.
I still feel comfortable using it and if Mozilla fixes just a few more things I may just switch back to using it.
http://saveie6.com/
Ha. Let's see, counting ... yep, I have seven different email accounts that I have to keep an eye on at least hourly, and a few more that I need to check less often. Gmail is just one of them. (No, forwarding them all to gmail is not an option.) I'm sure I'm going to maintain seven different web pages to dink around with each email - especially since most of the webmail clients don't do simple things like select and delete/move numerous emails at once, or drag and drop. Some webmail clients are truly horrendous (network solutions comes to mind)
Using TB I can move mail between accounts as well as between folders within accounts. I can use the same filters for mail coming in or going out on different accounts. And no ads, or tracking cookies, etc.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
What more is there for email?
Something more for Thunderbird is integrated instant messaging. I want unified email and instant messaging in one application so I'll have unified contacts and search. The number of instant messaging services supported by Thunderbird seems like it will be limited at first but that will improve with time and perhaps there will be add-ons available to support more services.
There is eventually a point where it's good enough and adding anything to it would detract.
They don't need to add new fluff to improve it, there is plenty there already that desperately needs to be improved. Just a couple of examples that immediately come to mind:
- Message tags have potential to be extremely useful, in their current implementation they don't do much other than color code your message. The dialog for managing the tags themselves was an afterthought, there is no way to re-order without directly editing the config, no way to assign hotkeys, no way to customize font styles other than choosing from a tiny fixed color palette.
- Rich text (html) editing is painful. You are always one keystroke away from changing your entire paragraph to the style of an adjacent paragraph. You can't define custom formats, or even edit the default formats. Even the "use last-picked color" convenience option in the color picker requires the same number of clicks as picking a new color.
- Editing the message source directly is another poorly designed dialog, it shouldn't be a dialog at all.
- The address book and contact management is another embarrassing afterthought, one area where you'd expect an email client to excel.
- Getting a consistent folder view is tedious, the "apply columns to..." tool doesn't work well and ignores saved searches altogether.
- Bugs in the account configuration have persisted for years.
- Some things open in tabs, others open in a new window.
I guess now that they've officially given up, I can start looking for alternatives instead of thinking they will ever fix these things.