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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.
And infinitely better than Google's horrible, completely unusable GMail "UI". For people who want an open source, Outlook-style drag-and-drop front-end for GMail, Thunderbird has been the way to go for a long time, but it has been plagued by the slow downs and other problems lately that are mentioned in TFS. Glad to hear they've acknowledged this and are at least considering fixing the issues.
Am I the only one that expects Mozilla to start removing buttons and bricking popular extensions like they did in FF and find new and exciting ways to make T-Bird a clone of GMail?
As a long time Mozilla user (since before T-Bird and FF split from the Mozilla suite), I'm glad to see them putting some effort into this project again but it's hard to trust these crack heads!
There's an add-on named LookOut (fixed version) for Thunderbird that handles attachments form Microsoft. I work for a company that is now doing some vendor work for Microsoft, so we had to either switch to Outlook or find a solution that worked with a standard email client. Fortunately, that add-on exists and was recently fixed.
They removed all of the features that differentiated Firefox from Chrome.
They made it impossible to stop the loading of ads, as opposed to loading them without showing them.
They removed the option to ask before setting cookies.
They deprecated DownThemAll and made it impossible to create a replacement.
I can think of 2 advantages Firefox has left over Chrome: it's open source, and you can turn the menu bar back on.
There's a huge difference between "any change is bad" and "these changes are bad". Changing defaults is fine, but it's bad to remove options.