<story><title>The Future of Thunderbird</title><url>https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbird-why-were-rebuilding-from-the-ground-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw0101a</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;That&amp;#x27;s also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I&amp;#x27;m already used to it. I&amp;#x27;m not really clamoring for a different UI, there&amp;#x27;s bigger problems.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn&amp;#x27;t enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support&amp;#x2F;donate to it.)&lt;p&gt;Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is &amp;#x27;current&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a &amp;#x27;core&amp;#x27; which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.</text></item><item><author>tux3</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I&amp;#x27;m &lt;i&gt;already&lt;/i&gt; used to it. I&amp;#x27;m not really clamoring for a different UI, there&amp;#x27;s bigger problems.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the user.&lt;p&gt;I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it&amp;#x27;d make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.&lt;p&gt;The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it&amp;#x27;s supposed to be sitting idle.</text></item><item><author>formerly_proven</author><text>&amp;gt; “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users&lt;p&gt;Honestly this doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it&amp;#x27;s literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I&amp;#x27;m using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to &amp;quot;boot&amp;quot;, so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orbital223</author><text>&amp;gt; Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is &amp;#x27;current&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the &amp;quot;Old School&amp;quot; interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn&amp;#x27;t exactly work out very well...</text></comment>
<story><title>The Future of Thunderbird</title><url>https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbird-why-were-rebuilding-from-the-ground-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw0101a</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;That&amp;#x27;s also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I&amp;#x27;m already used to it. I&amp;#x27;m not really clamoring for a different UI, there&amp;#x27;s bigger problems.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn&amp;#x27;t enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support&amp;#x2F;donate to it.)&lt;p&gt;Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is &amp;#x27;current&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a &amp;#x27;core&amp;#x27; which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.</text></item><item><author>tux3</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I&amp;#x27;m &lt;i&gt;already&lt;/i&gt; used to it. I&amp;#x27;m not really clamoring for a different UI, there&amp;#x27;s bigger problems.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the user.&lt;p&gt;I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it&amp;#x27;d make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.&lt;p&gt;The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it&amp;#x27;s supposed to be sitting idle.</text></item><item><author>formerly_proven</author><text>&amp;gt; “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users&lt;p&gt;Honestly this doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it&amp;#x27;s literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I&amp;#x27;m using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to &amp;quot;boot&amp;quot;, so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ablob</author><text>I started using thunderbird half a year ago and like the interface. Sure, there&amp;#x27;s problems (I haven&amp;#x27;t encountered a lot of them), but the overall user experience is far better than what I&amp;#x27;m used to from other email programs. The only thing that stuck out negatively was when I was searching for an email, in which the way I was wanting to solve it didn&amp;#x27;t work out as I thought it did. (I was looking for a mail containing specific words from a specific group of senders).&lt;p&gt;Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure that there will be more new users faster than old users leaving. If it doesn&amp;#x27;t work out, chances are that they ain&amp;#x27;t coming back.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t say anything about keeping TB open and having it steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail. Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht shouldn&amp;#x27;t create problems, however.</text></comment>