Thunderbird In 2019 To Focus On Performance & UI/UX Improvements

[Anvil]

wonder what this means for Seamonkey? afaik it only has 1 or 2 Devs working on it, surely SM will be Put to Rest

[Michael_S]

The one advantage of a web application is easier sign on for multiple devices. Right now I have to set up Thunderbird, then my email on Thunderbird, then my Radicale calendar on Thunderbird on each of my machines. When I use my wife's laptop I either have to set it up there too, or just not get it.

A webapp with a quick login would be easier. But it's no trivial thing, so I'm sticking with Thunderbird.

They could reimplement it in a modern native web app way. React / Redux frontend with Gatsby. WebGL graphics and MS office document rendering in a background WebWorker using emscripten translated C++ to JS code. JSON RPC REST API. Node.JS backend @ 127.0.0.1. All features could run as micro-services in their own Docker containers with different base OS layer for each container. Maybe mix in Kubernetes to orchestrate things.

I bet you work as a principal software architect somewhere for twice my salary. That's quite an evil post.

[V1tol]

It is not a problem to use web ui when you have only one email account from each of the providers (eg 1 gmail, 1 yahoo etc). For example, I have:
- Google: 1 personal and 2 corporate
- Yandex: 1 personal and 2 corporate
- Others, like mailru iclouddotcom, protonmail etc.

In total I have 11 Email accounts in my personal use. Each of those providers have their own web UI and sometimes I can hardly remember where I have to look for the feature I need right now. Not talking about that their UIs are eating lots of RAM in browser when you have to run many simultaneously. Sometimes I forget to switch from google personal to google corporate and it really pisses me off.

With Thunderbird I can easily do search for mail contents in any mailbox (for example, when I don't remember where I saw particular word) and in background it takes only 250MB RAM. It is important, when you may need another gigabyte or two of RAM not for web but for some useful stuff like docker etc. I can leave Thunderbird running in background so I receive urgent emails almost instantly. When I need to send email, I click on needed account and press Create - it will automatically type proper "From" address.

I am waiting for performance improvements (4 corporate accounts have ~15k messages each) and this client will be almost perfect.

[bemerk]

The current ui is totally fine. I think Themes wont hurt

[Danielsan]

Thunderbird still uses a paradigm that belongs to a previous era of internet, despite the fact I hate my gmail accounts and despite the fact that Gugl makes hard using gmail on any desktop clients, it is easier and faster checking your mailbox on Gmail rather than Thunderbird. Other desktop clients like Mailspring or Geary have modern interface and a better UI.

[bemerk]

There is Exquilla and Owl ,Lookout and others. Foundation for Exchange Support is there.

[Tomin]

My UX would get better if Thunderbird had spell checker again.

(details for anyone asking questions: https://github.com/voikko/mozvoikko/issues/5 )

[torsionbar28]

They could reimplement it in a modern native web app way. React / Redux frontend with Gatsby. WebGL graphics and MS office document rendering in a background WebWorker using emscripten translated C++ to JS code. JSON RPC REST API. Node.JS backend @ 127.0.0.1. All features could run as micro-services in their own Docker containers with different base OS layer for each container. Maybe mix in Kubernetes to orchestrate things.

LMAO!

[caligula]

They could reimplement it in a modern native web app way. React / Redux frontend with Gatsby. WebGL graphics and MS office document rendering in a background WebWorker using emscripten translated C++ to JS code. JSON RPC REST API. Node.JS backend @ 127.0.0.1. All features could run as micro-services in their own Docker containers with different base OS layer for each container. Maybe mix in Kubernetes to orchestrate things.

[NotMine999]

Tread lightly. It is very functional and practical as-is. My fear is the developers will take the Win10 & Gnome3 approach, i.e. radically altering the UI, producing an ugly clunky mess and breaking everyone's workflow in the process.

I completely agree.

If the Mozilla team does to Thunderbird what they have done to Firefox, Thunderbird will become another "was a good idea at one time" application.