Slashdot Mirror
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!"?
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".
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
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.
Firefox thrashes my hard drive until it is maxed out at 100% then promptly crashes.
Heh, yeah, I used to keep four years' worth of email in my inbox, too, and I never compacted my folders, either.
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...