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#Thunderbird Product Design manager @alecaddd answers a burning question with some important history, a look into the future, and some real talk.

blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/t…

Some of these talking points might be divisive. They might touch a nerve. But we believe in being transparent and open about both our past and our future.


The Future Of Thunderbird: Why We're Rebuilding From The Ground Up

"Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?" Let's answer that burning question with some important history.
Alessandro Castellani (The Thunderbird Blog)
#thunderbird @Aleca
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Depleted Veteran
Depleted Veteran
• •
oh boy here we go again, drop the "old & tired" desktop application and lets use Electron right? Guess I have to go back to #Kmail
#kmail
in reply to Depleted Veteran

Marquis Kurt
Marquis Kurt
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@sgtnasty Uh… what? Nowhere in the article did they mention using Electron as the front end. I get the disdain for Electron (I myself am not a fan), but let’s not jump to conclusions so quickly when we don’t have all the information, shall we?
@Depleted Veteran
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
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tl;dr:
Simply adding stuff on top of a crumbling architecture isn't sustainable, and we can’t keep ignoring it.

Throughout the next 3 years, we're aiming at these primary objectives:

1: Make the code base leaner and more reliable, rewrite ancient code, remove technical debt.

2: Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface.

3: Switch to a monthly release schedule.

in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Marquis Kurt
Marquis Kurt
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Best of luck with the efforts! Thunderbird was pretty good to use on Linux (and Mac, for the short while that I used it there).
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

jo
jo
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yeah this is a sore topic...

Email is a stone age technology. It's been feature complete for 15+ years.
What new things are you expecting to add?

As a user, I don't want a new UI.
I do want you to fix bugs. And I understand that tech debt makes that hard.

Just remember that Thunderbird is a productivity tool. Do not make the same dumb UX mistakes most phone app devs make these days. There is no need to "entertain" me.

in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Mike Sandells
Mike Sandells
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Does this mean the end of the UserChrome / UserContent CSS mechanism?

It's clunky, for sure, but offers a degree of flexibility that will be hard to reach with regular customisation options.

in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

happyborg
happyborg
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I'm very worried by this. I've used Thunderbird for many years because it works well enough, on Windows and then Linux 👏 .

I don't use it for anything but email, filtered to folders, a massive decades old database of past conversations and contacts. That's it.

I don't want it 'enhanced' or rewritten because it doesn't need that. I could suggest improvements but if tech debt prevents that, fine.

Same with K9 email used for decades, now being messed with to make it look different 🤦‍♂️

in reply to happyborg

Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
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@happyborg We hope you understand this is equally about modernizing the interface AND about making it exponentially easier for us to add and improve features, without fighting against archaic code.
@happyborg
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Mark Rotteveel
Mark Rotteveel
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@happyborg Unfortunately, "modernizing the interface" usually means "we used a bigger font, and more whitespace, so now less things fit on your screen, and oh yeah, 50% of the features are no longer available". I really hope that is not the end result of your work.
@happyborg
in reply to Mark Rotteveel

happyborg
happyborg
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@mrotteveel I've only seen people agree with my reply so far, have you polled users about what they want and don't want?
@Mark Rotteveel
in reply to happyborg

Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
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"A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially implemented with version 115 in July, aiming at offering a simple and clean interface for “new” users, as well as the implementation of more customizable options with a flexible and adaptable interface to allow veteran users to maintain that familiarity they love."
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Mark Rotteveel
Mark Rotteveel
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@happyborg I'll believe it when I see it, because "familiarity they love" is a superficial promise that you'll be able to recreate something that looks similar/familiar, not that it provides the same functionality or exact look-and-feel. And yes, I'm aware this may seem like I'm a nay-saying grumpy old man, but this happens again and again when applications rebuild their UI from the ground up, or "modernize" it.
@happyborg
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

happyborg
happyborg
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Did I sound like I didn't understand? 🤷‍♂️ I understand, and I don't want it because I'm fine with it as it is. As noted I can think of minor improvements but I'm ok without if they're hard.

Rewriting *will* introduce bugs & likely UI incompatibilities.

Changing the UI is not improvement for me. I know and like the existing UI. Changing this causes problems for anyone used to the existing interface which for such a mature product is a lot of your users, I guess >95%. Not good IMO.

in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Jmbmkn
Jmbmkn
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In an attempt to even out some of negativity. I returned to using Thunderbird because the UX was improved. I find white space and big icons less distracting and find it makes using Thunderbird as an email tool much simpler for me.
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Blake Carpenter
Blake Carpenter
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the roadmap looks nice. Any chance of Exchange support ever landing on it though? I'm stuck using Evolution on my work computer and miss having Thunderbird on all my machines.
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Dan Jones
Dan Jones
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Interesting. If you're rebuilding the interface from scratch, is this going to break compatibility with existing extensions, just like the recent Firefox rewrite did?

@thunderbird@mastodon.online

@Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Leo 🇲🇽
Leo 🇲🇽
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I hope that point 2 includes separate views for spaces. Clicking on calendar button, from the spaces panel, and have to search it's tab between e-mail tabs is not very consistent 🙌
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Marcus
Marcus
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That's awesome. I haven't used Thunderbird, personally, in some time, because the interface is a little clunky compared to Evolution, and it won't let me add a "receive only" mail account to check system alerts on my home server. Wish you guys the best of luck with your future roadmap, 🙂
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

🌈 Lascapi ⁂
🌈 Lascapi ⁂
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That’s sound amazing, open and trustworthy !!

I love the way Thunderbird is going since few years now!
The refreshing of the UX/UI is a great challenge because not everyone can be happy at the same times, but I think you can manage.

Greetings !!!

in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Hervé Renault
Hervé Renault
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Thunderbird does not look "old". It looks like a *good old reliable tool*. Please do not change this 🙏
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

josefin
josefin
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My question is how this will impact mobile. I've been wanting a "thunderbird for android" for a long time and was happy when I learned that you're building to make K-9 that (instead of K-9 slowly dying). But the blog post makes no mention of it.

For me, mobile is where I get most of my email..

in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Tim Chambers
Tim Chambers
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Is #ActivitySub still on the roadmap? Think adding Thunderbird as an inbox for Fediverse accounts as well as RSS and lastly email is super-compelling....
#activitysub
Unknown parent

Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
• •

@gekitsu @jo @happyborg

What if we told you that 115 will be considerably *more* customizable than it is now 😉

@raphael @happyborg @jo
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

raphael
raphael
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as i wrote – the part quoted from the blog post is making me rather more optimistic than i used to be. (not so much for how much customisation there is going be, but because there is a commitment to preserve familiarity for old users.)
in reply to raphael

Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
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@gekitsu Indeed. It's a very vocal and very large segment of our userbase, and we're absolutely paying attention.
@raphael
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Henrik Hemrin
Henrik Hemrin
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I returned to Thunderbird last year after thinking of doing it for a long time. I like it! Now on macOS but going to use it on Linux instead/also. Regarding release frequency, a thought that in Linux I prefer to install from the preository (deb), so the releases to me will be dependent also on releases by the maintainers there (in my case currently Linux Mint or eventually Mint LMDE). Good luck with the future work on Thunderbird!
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

mike805
mike805
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I have all my email on Thunderbird including work gmail. I like it, it works fine. Aside from security updates, what needs fixing? Any other Thunderbird users here with opinions?
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

The Uncle Mez 🇨🇬
The Uncle Mez 🇨🇬
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the problem here maybe those extreme privacist sons of the complotist
to me an improvement is always a good thing if we can control it
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Bill Taroli
Bill Taroli
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I don’t really think I need my tools to be visually exciting. In fact I prefer as little drama from my tools as possible.
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

Jo_Schu
Jo_Schu
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I'm more than happy that Thunderbird is being modernized. For me it was nearly unusable 2-3 years ago.
Can't wait for the new calendar btw!!
Keep up the good work :)
⇧