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 bob_super on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
> It took 10 years to get most of the bugs out and the interface stabilized
Therefore running out of interesting bugs to fix, and not using $Fashionable_platform and $Marketable_new_language.
If it ain't broken, and it ain't changing, it's great for users, not for programmers.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:31PM
Well, with how few programmers that are working on Thunderbird, minimal change seems best.
From lurking on various mailing lists and newsgroups, it seems that it is going to take all their programmers to just keep legacy add-ons working and/or migrate to the new add-on paradigm.