Thunderbird 68.0 Released As A Big Update For The Mozilla Mail Client

[waxhead]

That sounds terrible and is typically indicative of bad software engineering. Are you being sarcastic?

I agree with these crazy version numbers, but rewriting something from scratch is very different from adding new features/major re-factoring.

Nope, I am not sarcastic.
New features belong in revision bump, major re-factoring is no less indicative of bad software engineering than writing it from scratch. Or at least putting bits and pieces of working code together in a new way.

[Mavman]

If only Kontact was available for windows...

[NateHubbard]

And it’s still completely useless because I can’t minimize it to the systray meaning it wastes space on my taskbar. Sigh.

Use a different desktop.

[jacob]

Why not just use K-9?

Because certificate-based authentication in K9 has been broken for years and years and no one seems to care. Which makes K9 wholly unusable for my needs.

[xorbe]

Let me guess, still can't configure all hot keys, and the view port selections are still limited.

[cen1]

and STILL no fix for bug 475886

[starshipeleven]

The same can be said for SoftMaker Office, but they adapted the desktop UI to Android with little changes and it works just fine. So if they can do it, then so can Thunderbird.

If you actually read the full post I explain why.

A mail client "backend" (i.e. the part that actually fetches email from server and stores them around) is not a particularly hard thing to do in 2019. Thunderbird's "mail backend" isn't much different from any other Android mail application.

A Office suite is not really the same thing. Writing, pagination, tables and spreadsheets and all that (draw and whatever) isn't just GUI, there is a rendering engine and code to deal with calculations and graphs in the spreadsheets. Whatever you show in the "page" or "spreadsheet" window on a desktop office you will also show on a mobile Office suite.
That's a significant "backend" to the GUI part.

99% of Thunderbird's value is it's GUI component, and that is worthless for mobile.

A "Thunderbird for Android" would be an application that shares nearly no code with desktop thunderbird. It would just be branding "Thunderbird" an otherwise independent Android Mail application.

Why not just contribute to K-9 Mail instead?

It really makes little difference. Seriously if you have a version 11 or an older system say 10.1 the numbers mean little without context. You still have to refer to documentation to understand what the delta is all about.

If you know what is considered to be the API, you can make expectations. You should expect that an upgrade from 10.1.* to 11.*.* will introduce breaking changes, and that you might need to spend some time getting things to work.

[Vistaus]

Does not make much sense. The Thunderbird GUI is not really suited to mobile use

The same can be said for SoftMaker Office, but they adapted the desktop UI to Android with little changes and it works just fine. So if they can do it, then so can Thunderbird.

[muncrief]

Use the "dev" version and disable automatic updates: https://github.com/ysard/mintrayr/releases

EDIT: I have just tested this add-on with TB 68 and sadly it doesn't work anymore. Will stay with TB 60 for now...

Yes, I have been using the dev version all along, and also disabled automatic updates. There's just a bug that causes it to need to be reinstalled every few boots. However I learned to live with it as I typically suspend my computer and only reboot every week or so.

As for it not working with TB 68, that's why my original post started with "Oh good god no." Mozilla developers have never cared about breaking extensions, which is one of the reasons people are flocking from their products. It's a shame because the products themselves are actually very good. But by constantly breaking browser and email client extensions they've rendered their products close to unusable.