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Mozilla Thunderbird Outlines Plans For 2019: Addressing UI Lags, Performance Issues; Improved 3rd-Party Email Integration, Encryption Usability (mozilla.org)
For years, Mozilla has largely neglected development of Thunderbird, an email client it owns. But the company, which grew its team to eight staff last year, says it plans to address most of the issues that users have complained about and add six more people to Thunderbird staff this year, it said in a blog post. In the blog post Wednesday, the company said: Our hires are already addressing technical debt and doing a fair bit of plumbing when it comes to Thunderbird's codebase. Our new hires will also be addressing UI-slowness and general performance issues across the application. This is an area where I think we will see some of the best improvements in Thunderbird for 2019, as we look into methods for testing and measuring slowness -- and then put our engineers on architecting solutions to these pain points. Beyond that, we will be looking into leveraging new, faster technologies in rewriting parts of Thunderbird as well as working toward a multi-process Thunderbird.
[...] For instance, one area of usability that we are planning on addressing in 2019 is integration improvements in various areas. One of those in better Gmail support, as one of the biggest email providers it makes sense to focus some resources on this area. We are looking at addressing Gmail label support and ensuring that other features specific to the Gmail experience translate well into Thunderbird. We are looking at improving notifications in Thunderbird, by better integrating with each operating system's built-in notification system. By working on this feature Thunderbird will feel more "native" on each desktop and will make managing notifications from the app easier.
The UX/UI around encryption and settings will get an overhaul in the coming year, whether or not all this work makes it into the next release is an open question â" but as we grow our team this will be a focus. It is our hope to make encrypting Email and ensuring your private communication easier in upcoming releases, we've even hired an engineer who will be focused primarily on security and privacy.
[...] For instance, one area of usability that we are planning on addressing in 2019 is integration improvements in various areas. One of those in better Gmail support, as one of the biggest email providers it makes sense to focus some resources on this area. We are looking at addressing Gmail label support and ensuring that other features specific to the Gmail experience translate well into Thunderbird. We are looking at improving notifications in Thunderbird, by better integrating with each operating system's built-in notification system. By working on this feature Thunderbird will feel more "native" on each desktop and will make managing notifications from the app easier.
The UX/UI around encryption and settings will get an overhaul in the coming year, whether or not all this work makes it into the next release is an open question â" but as we grow our team this will be a focus. It is our hope to make encrypting Email and ensuring your private communication easier in upcoming releases, we've even hired an engineer who will be focused primarily on security and privacy.
It's good to read that Mozilla is re-committing to development of Thunderbird. I happen to like Thunderbird and use it daily. Yes, it's UI can be clunky at times and it does need some work, but the bottom line, is that it is still better than M$ Outlook.
What we really need is for the major webmail platforms to implement GPG in a way that is basically transparent to users. Doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing and off those of us who do want perfection the opportunity to use a really secure dedicated client.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When Mozilla spoke of bettering Firefox for the last years, the result for me was to revert to Seamonkey. Thunderbird was not affected by the "betterment" because it has been layed aside for some years now by Mozilla. How come that I read this announcement as a clear sign of "Danger, Will Robinson!"?
The new API f'ed up some of the best extensions... No Message Pane Sort by Mouse, Minimize on start and close, hide local folders... (MinimizetoTray revived as well, but that one got Reanimated on the new API)
Why is it that all of these extremely basic features are absent from Thunderbird base package? I have no idea.
I don't want your God damn local folders, hide them!
I want Thunderbird to always be open with Windows, but not stay in my taskbar, send it to the systray where it belongs!
Why is there no options to disable sorting by default!? I keep clicking on From/Subject and what not when trying to open the latest email at the top!
This is about Thunderbird, not FF. Did you read the headline?
... at trying their level best and getting it just not quite entirely wrong.
Examples? Failing to fix the download timer but papering it over as if the user is an idiot for one. For another, what thunderbird+enigmail does when forwarding multipart/alternative with encryption. It takes some serious braindeaderity to come up with shit like that.
Entirely wrong and entirely bad is the purview of redmond, of course. But mozilla is truly the "off" brand of "wrong".
How about fixing the logo so it doesn't look like a blue wig on a planet?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Eggs meet basket
On top of that, I do use profiles with Firefox today. If you have a problem with them then try googling for a solution.
And infinitely better than Google's horrible, completely unusable GMail "UI".
That's a matter of personal preference. I've been a long time user of both and while I don't love the Gmail UI, I generally find it more practical than I do the Thunderbird UI most of the time. Plus it has the HUGE advantage of being the same and available from any computer anywhere. This may or may not matter to you but it is a big benefit to me.
I've always wanted Thunderbird to give me a compelling reason to use it more than I do but it's just stagnated for so long I moved on for most of my workflow. I still have it installed and I fire it up now and then but for me at least, GMail's web client works just as well if not better most of the time and requires less overhead to manage. Hell they don't even have a 64 bit version released yet except on the daily channel for testers. If they provide better integration with GMail (and other services) that could improve things. The UI on Thunderbird is pretty clumsy and hasn't really improved much in the last 10 years.
Can they fix it so it doesn't lose connection with my mail server so often? I'm tired of having to restart it all of the time!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
You can't support gmail until they implement IMAP properly.
What we really need is for the major webmail platforms to implement GPG in a way that is basically transparent to users.
Several problems with that statement.
1) GPG like most other end-to-end public key encryption requires substantial maintenance and knowledge on the parts of the end users to be properly effective. Good luck explaining proper public/private key maintenance to my technologically impaired mother.
2) There appears to be no way to reconcile ease of use with security to a degree acceptable to a non-paranoid non-technical user
3) Using GPG on a webmail system pretty much defeats the entire point of such encryption since you have to trust the message in plain text at some point to a third party of unknown trustworthiness. (do you REALLY trust Google/Apple/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc that much?)
4) The overhead of using GPG (or similar) in a properly secure way is well beyond the capabilities or interest level of most users.
5) Both the sender and recipient need to be willing and able to participate and deal with the overhead of encryption AND know how to generate/handle keys securely.
None of these problems are unique to GPG so I'm not bashing that product. It's good at what it does but any other public/private key encryption will have more or less the same issues.
Doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing and off those of us who do want perfection the opportunity to use a really secure dedicated client.
If it isn't perfect, it isn't secure. And while I agree with your sentiments there appears to be no practical way to resolve the challenges above such that it would become accessible/useful to all but the most tech savvy of users.
I've used Thunderbird forever. I use it to access my Gmail account (IMAP) and have had no issues with it. I also have used the Lightning integration to access my Google Calendar successfully for many years. I couldn't live without them. My only issue is with the Thunderbird team breaking so many extensions every time they update.
1. An option, in about:config, that says DO NOT SEND ME A COPY WHEN I HIT REPLY ALL. No, you're wrong, a lot of us do not want that copy.
2. The bug in addressing. When you have a list of recipients, and you go to delete one (say, from your reply all), and you highlight it with the cursor and accidentally go up one, it *adds* a blank line.
3. Tabbing in addressing is broken. I can tab back from subject to the last person, but then, if I hit back tab again, it does *not* go up to the previous recipient.
More and more of our customers are switching to Outlook, so it's a pain to train people to save the file and run tnef at the command line. Yes, it's proprietary, but Microsoft is pushing it hard so the problem is just going to get worse.
Mapping your shortcut to firefox -p doesn't do enough for you?
It'd sure be nice if they'd make that an option again. Would it kill them to allow users to set that as the displayed date/time format without making them jump through bizarre hoops of setting that up via specifying some decidedly non-intuitive locale? Recent versions have made even jumping through those hoops all but impossible. The developer input on the T-bird discussion forums seems to want to blame the removal of this format on external groups responsible for defining locales. (So... the buck stops over there, eh?) Come on, folks... Make it an "advanced" feature. Warn us about "voiding our warranty". But, shees, make it an option. (I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm part of a small minority, but I'd like to have all the Linux utilities that output timestamps include an option to use "yyyy-mm-dd" for the dates.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
A BrendaEM To-Do list:
1. Make Firefox comments on a Firefox story instead of on a Thunderbird story
I am excited for Thunderbird. Good when you still want your data local.
I use the Calendar add in Lighting and sync it to Google calendar. The Thunderbird / Lighting Calendar prints well and can be easier to input.
The address book (for physical addresses and other information) is not bad, but does need some help.
Of course so many don't understand this is Thunderbird not Firefox.
I will say even Firefox is very good these days. Those that trash it will regret it when the web looses open standards to just Chrome. I was sad when I heard MS may move over to Chromium. The web needs diversity and interoperability.
It begins and ends with the UI. Mozilla shall fuck it up and fuck it over. R.I.P. Thunderbird.
Firefox thrashes my hard drive until it is maxed out at 100% then promptly crashes. Much of the world has not replaced their aging equipment with SSDs, something in my perception is completely lost on Firefox developers. All of which are probably using high-end machines.
Don't forget the common man. Something I'm afraid many developers are far too ready to do.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
If Thunderbird takes more than a few tens of MB to read my email then I might as well open a tab to gmail in my browser (which takes up 256MB on Chrome). I know that HTML emails take up space when images etc. are included, but seriously, internal data structures and text really should not use up that much RAM in a native program.
The whole point of running a "native app" is performance and efficiency. It shouldn't be a very high bar either.
It's inevitable.
The question is when.
... lobotomizing the REST of the really-useful extensions, and pissing off the developers that created them?
Maybe they'll *finally* prioritize a fix for bug #589870:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589870
Millions of voices cried out in agony, and were ignored...
As their favorite email client came to the attention of the Change-for-the-sake-of-change, user-ignoring, social-justice-pushing, useful-UX-hating organization that "owns" it. Ruination is sure to follow.
Anybody know a good alternative? I understand Eudora has been set Free.
In case your Thunderbird hangs for seconds at times: switch the storage engine to maildir and it'll be smooth again.
Gone will be the time of having to compress folders, differential backups (rsync, zfs snapshots, whatnot) work fast and perfect (as only the actually new or deleted mails have to be processed instead of whole new mailbox files after compression), moving mails to other folders is instant as it's a rename in the local filesystem instead of a copy.
Switching is easy: shutdown TB, change the storage backend in the prefs.js (point to a different folder than the old maildir), start TB and wait for the download from the IMAP server to complete, test and when happy finally discard the old mailbox folders. Forget the converter, that one doesn't work for real accounts (with some data in them).
Works perfectly, only thing they have to do is to enable maildir backend by default.
"which grew its team to eight staff last year"
There are only 8 people working on this project, and less prior?
WTF?!
On second thought, nevermind, all my questions about all the incessant bugs and unresolved problems for this software have now been answered.
I think you have to use -noremote as well to run multiple profiles at once but yes it is easy.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Just about every broken thing in thunderbird was fixed by extensions. Then they broke the API without bothering to fix ANY of the things those extensions addressed.
The support board is full of "solved" problems (i.e. fixed by an addon) that are no longer solved. But they're archived, so you can't even re-open them and mark them as open issues.
Fucking idiots
The whole thing was managed by morons.
Maybe too little, surely too late. I'me more or less done migrating away from Thunderbird, which I have used for more than a decade.
Thunderbird has been getting steadily worse for some time now but the last few releases made me seriously reconsider.
Notable problems are the massive memory leaks and god only knows what it is doing instead of responding to the user.
I've deleted ~/.thunderbird and recreated all my accounts en the problems immediately reappeared. It has become completely unusable at this point.
Leave it running for a day and what started with 300-400Mb of resident memory is now a 1.5Gb process and when you are using it the UI is stalling with one core pegged at a 100% for dozens of seconds at a time while consuming multiple gigabytes of memory. If it is not stalling it is as slow as molasses.
3) Webmail has to die. There simply is no alternative.
Webmail won't die and you need to get over it. Millions of people find it hugely useful primarily because of the portability of it. It's also very easy to administer which makes it appealing to management.
How often does someone log in to a full computer that doesn't belong to him or her instead of just checking their phone to read e-mail?
Speaking for myself, literally every day at work. I don't own my computer at work and I check both personal and work emails there. (yes my employer is fine with that but doesn't want to store my emails on their machines nor do I want to store my email on their machines) A web client is the most practical solution for us. I have about a half dozen email accounts and webmail makes it much easier to manage them. Many emails I compose would be very awkward and/or slow to compose on a phone.. Maybe you like typing long emails on your phone but I don't. When I was in college I was routinely using university computers to log into my accounts since carrying a laptop everywhere is awkward and sometimes I needed a real keyboard and full sized monitor. I also routinely use my wife's computer to check emails and she doesn't need a bunch of software installed for my crap on her machine.
Maybe YOU don't need to use computers you don't own but lots of us do.
The OS could do more to facilitate proper key management.
Yes the OS can help to a point but there are limits. Not the least of which is that the people you communicate with have to be on board with generating and exchanging keys for it to have any value at all. Good luck with that. Literally nobody I communicate with would be willing to go to the bother even if it were trivial to do. They would perceive it as an unnecessary and pointless hoop to jump through even if they understand the purpose conceptually. They perceive very little of their communication as sensitive enough to justify the overhead. If people cannot be bothered to maintain strong passwords do you seriously think they are going to do any better with the more complicated endeavor of key management? Not likely...
Beware of geeks bearing gifts.
You can be pretty sure that Mozilla has ulterior motives. For example, forcing TB to carry advertising, or as others have noted, to eviscerate its useful functions and change it into a generic piece of crap. Whatever Gmail does to make money is what Mozilla is going to want TB to do. You heard it here first.
Right, time to go back to Pegasus Mail. Shouldn't have left it.