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Mozilla is asking for feedback about Thunderbird and threatening a redesign. Thunderbird is the most feature-rich of the GUI mail clients, but as a result also has a lot of cruft. The goal of the survey is to learn what Thunderbird users think about the current design, what are the biggest drawbacks, what potential changes should there be, and so on. The claim is that the information will be considered before any actual changes are made to the program itself.
See also Bryan Lunduke's interview with newly fledged Thunderbird developer Ryan Sypes about future directions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BQugHIccTI
So if you rely on Thunderbird for any part of your work flow, speak up now before it ends up unusable trash like M$ Outlook or Apple Mail.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:15AM (14 children)
It must be time to crap all over the user interface!
C'mon. Just leave it be. Thunderbird is about the only thing that hasn't been ruined in the last decade.
About a year ago I nearly switched to alpine. Got it working, used it a while, wanted to make some minor tweaks but put it on the back burner. This may be the shove that pushes me back to where I really want to be, no goddamn GUI!
And of course the survey page is a vomitorium of CSS and scripts and horrendously bloated inscrutable code. Yeah, these are the people I want tinkering with Thunderbird.
Fucking idiots! Please, really, just stop. Stop it already.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:25AM (11 children)
Fuck the fucking fuckers to fucking hell!
I just took the survey (in my radiation-shielded browser that runs fucking scripts) and it is clear the way they've stacked the questions that they've already decided.
"Is this interface boring or exciting?"
IT IS NOT YOUR JOB TO EXCITE ME
Just deliver the goddamn mail!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:31AM
No no no, you're being over excited now. The question was whether the UI was inspiring.
Other than that I'm with you 100% on this. The current UI is full-featured and works well. I don't want it prettified, spaceified or dumbed down further.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:38AM (1 child)
If you look at the pictures, one thing I immediately noticed is that the screenshots were taken on screens with different resolutions. This makes the old version (on the smaller screen) appear to be more cluttered and with more dead space, as the padding is physically larger on the smaller screen.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by http on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:33AM
In addition, one version shows active events and the other doesn't.
Some fucker is trying to put their thumb on the scale.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:25AM (1 child)
Boring is good, exciting is bad, when it comes to UIs.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:13AM
WRONG. The Principle of Least Astonishment is outdated. Click in the whitespace.... BOOM! Deleted. CTRL-C... BOOM! Shutdown.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:43AM (1 child)
I think you may be correct that, as usual, the Gnomists* already have their unusable build with the flat look and silly defaults in the wings. As a formailty, before clicking 'commit' to CVS / GiT / whatever, they "run a user survey."
At this moment, Thunderbird is working fine for me. They should please not try to 'modernize' it by screwing it up.
* Gnomists, n.: a cult of early 21st century software developers whose mission was to introduce maximum unusability in applications they worked on. The cult seems to have originated from the Gnome 3 desktop developers. Fortunately for mankind, the cult were totally wiped out worldwide in the revolutions of the mid 2020's.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:55AM
If they do this I'm going to use Sylpheed, Claws, or even learn Mutt/Pine instead.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:05AM (3 children)
Pick the rightmost option, the 7, for everything about the old UI. Pick the leftmost option, the 1, for everything about the new UI.
Oh yeah, the old one is so simple and modern and exciting! The new one is boring, obsolete, and confusing!
There are open-ended questions. We should all demand these features:
1. Restore the original threading algorithm: https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html [jwz.org]
2. Allow full traditional control of the Debian bug system, including easy insertion of the non-standard email header.
3. Allow reliable and easy sending of patches to the linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org mailing list. This means not fucking with whitespace at all. Don't word-wrap. Don't do HTML. Don't convert between tabs and spaces. Don't remove spaces from the ends of the lines. Don't remove empty lines from the end of the email. Don't MIME encode anything.
4. Allow forcing UTF-8, latin-1, or ASCII. Allow forcing just-send-8bit behavior.
5. Fully support both types of X11 copy-and-paste operations. Old-style is highlight to copy, then middle click to paste. New-style is Control-C to copy a selection and Control-V to paste.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:12PM
That's too obvious, and too easy to filter out. The important thing is to be consistently more on the right for the old design than for the new design.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:47PM
Most of what you list can be accomplished with old style add-ons. And Thunderbird correctly supports copy and paste with the correct ctrl-insert and shift-insert, no need to copy Apple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:49PM
Should be "Swipe right if you think it is exciting" and "Swipe left if you think it is boring"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:27AM
1360 lines of junk to render a blank page. Utter incompetence. What do you expect from the people that ruined Firefox?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:05PM
Goodness yes! Alpine and Claws-Mail are what I use, except when I'm at work. HTML mail is an abomination. Perhaps we should have markdown or something if we need formatting. At least I can tell Seamonkey to ignore font and color styles--idiots don't realize I don't even see their cute purple 24pt Comic Sans text with their name in the cursive font like it's their handwritten signature or something. I'm otherwise stuck with Seamonkey at work because I need something to parse out the HTML and pages of x-mso-ermahgerd and x-mso-you-do-not-know-de-wae styles.
For that matter, why is it impossible for HTML mail composers like Outlook to use only a few tags like <em> or <strong>, maybe a <ol> here or <ul> there?
Agh, I already know the answer. Fucking sales and marketing idiots who don't even have the mental faculties to pass a middle school introductory algebra class! And they're proud of the fact that they're too intellectually deficient to handle middle school maths!