Flying on its own, Thunderbird seeks input on new look Now that the open source email client Thunderbird is sleeping in a separate bed from Mozilla, the project has called on outside help for a UI redesign. It's working with Polish designers Monterail to help with the redesign, partly because in 2016 that company created a popular custom UI theme for Thunderbird. Monterail's …
and as a long term T'bird user,
I really don't care what the paint job looks like as long as it works.
I don't want any 'fiddling while rome burns' to make it pretty at the expense of its operation especially the ease of use.
Far too much software these days is all bling and little substence. I'll hold my hand up here as a software developer for those times when I have bowed to PM demands to 'make it pretty' rather than functional.
"It will supposedly be based on this theme, "
Sigh. Themes are evil. All themes.
Time was that people who actually researched usability for a living discovered the "amazing" fact that sticking to the same theme as every other app actually made your one more usable, because human beings only had to learn once how everything worked. But that was learned ages ago, so it probably isn't true anymore, or something.
> But that was learned ages ago, so it probably isn't true anymore, or something.
It seems to me that the new UI's being pushed for PC use these days are usually less usable than what they replace.
It seems that the theory is that just because something is 'old' it is somehow automatically in need of being replaced with something 'new'.
Using the same logic, I guess we need to find a new way of steering cars. That steering wheel thingy has been around for too long now.... :-)
Particularly in GTK land, where the GNOME people have decided that even windows decorations should be the domain of the apps, so they can decide what borders and min/max/close/etc buttons are there and how they should look and act.
I actually really like themes, but from the KDE side of things, where a theme is what you set in your desktop environment's settings and then *all applications* display accordingly. That's the KDE way; sane defaults, and lots of customization available but centralized so that there's cohesion. And then a GTK or even worse an outright GNOME app will waltz into my life and ruin it all (although the ability to set matching GTK themes in KDE's System Settings is somewhat of a panacea).
But yeah it really is shocking how much is done to make applications break away from a desktop environment's look & feel. Adobe is particularly atrocious for this, where their various products, and launchers for their products, and installers for their launchers for their products, seem to aim for as much heterogenity as possible and completely ignore the desktop OS they're targeted at. I mean it's honestly not very hard to make your application look native to Windows when it's running on Windows, native to macOS when it's running there, etc etc, but so many companies deliberately do the exact opposite, and then keep changing their minds so there isn't even uniformity across their *own* software interfaces.
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> I really don't care what the paint job looks like as long as it works.
The group that developed Palemoon as an improved version of Firefox also developed Fossamail, apparently using similar techniques to develop a fast, sleek, working Thunderbird. The last few years of Thunderbird, like Firefox, have seen it getting slower and more bloated. I wonder if this is because of all the old crufty Firefox stuff in T'bird. It is still such an important, useful bit of software to so many, and needs years of layers of paint removed, rather another layer for today.
Fossamail is no more:
This project has been discontinued!
Thank you for your interest in FossaMail, an Open Source, Mozilla Thunderbird-based mail, news and chat client for Windows and Linux.
It was an alternative version of the Mozilla Thunderbird mail&news client, and based on the Pale Moon browser core.
Unfortunately, due to lack of time to maintain the code, and lack of users and funds, we've discontinued this project.
"... also developed Fossamail .."
That project seems to have been discontinued: https://www.fossamail.org/
Shame, as I'm still looking for an alternative to Eudora. Using Thunderbird but not overly fond of it. Incidentally, I would be happy to pay for a good e-mail client. Any suggestions?
Lots of options out there, depending on your platform and requirements. Here are some cross-platform options:
Trojitá: Not under as much development lately and there hasn't been a new stable release for a while, but still being worked on (see: https://cgit.kde.org/trojita.git/). You can download it at http://trojita.flaska.net/download.html
Claws Mail: Kindof an oldskool client, but very actively maintained and pretty much a Eudora clone, at least a clone of how Eudora was when I last used it ;) http://www.claws-mail.org/
And if you're over in Linux (or even just Unix-like) land, there are many options, like KMail, Geary, Evolution, etc.
H in The Hague: Incidentally, I would be happy to pay for a good e-mail client. Any suggestions?
If on Windows, I've been using eM Client, and it works well: http://www.emclient.com/. I'd prefer a cross-platform solution, but can't find a decent one. On Linux, I like Evolution.
Yeah. Unfortunately Thunderbird is still an XUL application, meaning it's legacy code and they will have to fork it off Firefox codebase soon. Some months ago they were speculating on their blog if they should rewrite Thunderbird A) from scratch in HTML5 with a modern GMail UI or B) rewrite from scratch piece-per-piece and keep the same Thunderbird old-school look&feel. Apparently they choose C) just update the theme a little bit and decide on the hard part, what do next, later.
It's a shame, as Thunderbird is pretty good though still unfinished and stayed in the year 2005 forever. Thunderbird has been in maintenance mode for years, and the only things that gets fixed are little graphical theme changes no one asked for, while the issues lists grows by the day and rarely someone fixes the broken parts, let alone introducing new features like a conversation-view or complete the Lightning calendar integration. Now that Mozilla declared XUL dead, the future of Thunderbird seems more uncertain than ever. Sad progres.
GMail UI is already old - and never was a great UI. It's OK for the casual user at most. Another example that Google got right its search engine only, and from the on, nothing - but its data slurping operations, of course.
Exactly the UI you DON'T WANT in a powerful email client.
GMail UI is already old - and never was a great UI.
In recent years I've found the Gmail interface increasingly frustrating. Too much of what I don't want, too little of what I do.
Last week I needed a non-Gmail address for testing and decided to set up one at Yahoo.
Check it out. It's really a lovely UI, very modern, but also clean and simple.
"I've found the Gmail interface increasingly frustrating"
Not just the UI, all of Gmail is getting increasingly frustrating. They seem to be missing the main thing about webmail - that you can use it anywhere and end up having a double conniption fit if you try to sign on from somewhere *unusual* like hotel wi-fi.
" Some months ago they were speculating on their blog if they should rewrite Thunderbird A) from scratch in HTML5 with a modern GMail UI or B) rewrite from scratch piece-per-piece and keep the same Thunderbird old-school look&feel. Apparently they choose C) just update the theme a little bit and decide on the hard part, what do next, later."
Personally I'd have preferred the alternative C) let LibreOffice take it over.
People have more success using attractive interfaces. This has been demonstrated by implementing identical functionality in two guis (one ugly, one pretty) and seeing how usable they are. When things go wrong users are put off by an ugly interface much more quickly than a pretty one. They will persist with the pretty one, often to a successful conclusion, while abandoning the ugly one.
So if you want software to be successful you need to think about what it looks like.
People have more success using attractive interfaces. This has been demonstrated by implementing identical functionality in two guis (one ugly, one pretty) and seeing how usable they are.
For Exhibit A (ugly) see Lotus Notes.
"People have more success using attractive interfaces."
Perhaps, but "attractive" is a very subjective thing. How do you nail that down? As a ferinstance, most of the "modern" UIs that have been produced over the past several years have been fairly ugly.
Give me clear and functional over "pretty" any day of the week.
"from scratch in HTML5 with a modern GMail UI"
That would make me bail on TBird pretty quickly for two reasons.
First, HTML-based interfaces, at their best, are never as good as native ones -- so I dearly hope that TBird doesn't go that route in the first place. Better they leave the current interface unchanged than do that.
Second, The GMail interface, specifically, is awful.
What I meant in the other comment:
"Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies" March 2017
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2017-March/005298.html
What's the news about that? Now that XUL is EOL, they certainly need a migration path, right?
I read Thunderbird can't easily switch from XUL to HTML as Gecko in HTML mode doesn't have a tree view (for folders) or a list view which groups by criteria or populates as you scroll (for thousands of items in a folder). As they're not in the HTML standard or necessary for Firefox, Mozilla won't add them either.
This is what happens when an organisation like Mozilla succumbs to group think and everyone thinks it's fine to assume that your application's UI and a web page is the same thing.
Should be IRRELEVANT. Total madness to do other than the opened email content using a browser engine, sandboxed, so HTML can be rendered. Such a thing can also manage the sadly rare text email. The rest of the application (or ANY application) should NEVER EVER use browser technology.
Only Web pages and HTML documents should use browser code which should be sandboxed from the rest of the application. Because you know remote content, HTML and javascript ...
"I really don't care what the paint job looks like as long as it works."
^ This.
I looked at the blog post, at the image, and filled in the survey with comments to the effect that they're talking about "Improving its Interface" - but the image looks like the same interface with some icky paint job on it.
Also, the questions are so stupid. For example: Does it look "trustworthy" - WTF?
I can't "trust" something where form is given more import than function. So that comment got added as well.
The whole point of a GUI is that programs look alike and so are easier to use. Mozilla forgot this a few iterations ago and made Firefox almost unusable. And now the same bastardisation is about to be visited on TB which, although a bit creaky in places, has been a fine, rich email client for years.
I despair.
"Ain't broke:"
Unfortunately, as a long term user of Thunderbird, my experience is that it is broke, and I've just spent the last week migrating away from it. It had simply got to the point where I could no longer trust it to do its job. Emails would download and vanish into a black hole, never to return. Folders would corrupt, rebuild, and dump 90% of their contents. Search functionality became increasingly a hit and miss game of chance.
This, combined with the continued history of neglect and changes of ownership, does not fill me with confidence for a software application that I need to rely on. So I am afraid we must now part ways.
Pegasus and Mercury are still alive and kicking. For the record, it's the only Windows program that I still support. I'd still support the Netware NLM version, too, but I don't know anyone running Netware anymore. Truly a great email system. Sadly, there will probably never be a Linux version. If there were, I'd dump (al)pine in a heartbeat and pay money for it. (Are you listening, David?)
Windows users can find it here. Recommended.
"Ain't broke:
Don't fix it."
Yup, apart from things that are genuinely broken. And stuff they broke trying to be clever and shiny.
Moz didn't just dump TBird, they tied it to the bumper and dragged it down the road several miles too.
I used to subsbribe to the dev list but had to leave when the attitude was clearly 'we're right, you're wrong and know nothing, it's a feature not a bug, you'll learn to love it, fingers now in ears and bug closed'
Yup I wish it was taken over by Libre, and some of the devs put out to pasture permanently.
Hope for the best, but fear the worst..... gmail sucks chocolate covered salty balls Mr Garrity.
These "labels" just mean we've got our priorities straight and we're not finding truckloads of bugs every few months to justify major changes. As a software developer who values "working", I'd be proud to stick either label on my work. I suspect that Thunderbird's target audience is already dominated by folks who feel the same way.
I'm sure the "form over content" brigade can find another email client.
Well, there is always something to improve. As an example, Thunderbird offers partial support for the Maildir storage format but it's languished for years in a semi-complete state. I even contacted the team to ask if I could make a donation specifically towards fixing the remaining issues. They had no way of assigning donations to Bugzilla tickets, unfortunately. I still sent some money their way, I think it's important for Thunderbird to keep going.
As for a visual refresh: as long as the budget is modest and well spent, why not? It did work as a PR hook, obviously, which is a good thing in itself.
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