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.

Comments

Crypto

[AmiMoJo]

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.

looks like problems ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

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!"?

ISO8601 date format?

[rnturn]

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.)