Although it sometimes feels like a bag full of sharp edges, I’m glad that there’s still life in the Thunderbird project.
Personally pleased that CardDAV address book support has arrived. One of those things that I had assumed Thunderbird had until I tried to find it a few months ago.
This is just one bug, but maybe an example – Thunderbird sets its own timezone in its configs, and sets a default to Pacific while ignoring the timezone on the OS (?) Then shows calendar invites with no time zone indication! It’s as if it was engineered to get people to miss meetings. Those bugs, with many others, are sitting in the bug tracker and have been there a long time.
Just to add to the list of issues: I have a workflow in Thunderbird where I will sort by sender and triage my e-mail, often repeatedly hitting the ‘a’ key to archive a bunch of keys from the same sender. This works great, but obviously you sometimes end up archiving a mail you didn’t mean to this way. That’s fine, Thunderbird has a shortcut ctrl+z to undo archiving an e-mail. But after you hit that shortcut, it takes a pretty long time for the e-mail to show up in the e-mail list again. You would expect the e-mail to just immediately appear again when you undo archiving it, but no. I suspect the way it works is that there’s a disconnect between the UI and the data model; in the model, the e-mail is immediately un-archived, but the change to the model doesn’t immediately update the UI to reflect that.
I suppose a general feeling of jank and lack of polish, especially when it comes to the calendar and address book. It feels like different parts of the app have been developed at very different paces (which is true) so there’s less consistency to the interfaces than you might expect and it can be hard to find where one toggle this particular setting etc.
As an example, I mentioned how I’m pleased at the introduction of CardDAV support but have so far been unable to find where exactly it lives…
I’m using it for email mostly, but I did switch away to kmail on linux after it killed its own search index every second day 3 years ago, leading to glitchy search results. And I’ve had it once on a system that the imap account didn’t have any trash bin anymore, which leads to the issue that you actually can’t delete anything anymore. But these are just two issues that I’ve had once in 8 years.
Thunderbird’s search is unreliable/incomplete though. For searches I use the web client of our mail host. Otherwise I often won’t find what I’m looking for.
On Windows, the UI will freeze for several seconds in the middle of typing and when it resumes it will sometimes randomly move focus to another window before processing the rest of the input buffer. Normally this is mildly annoying but the main window binds some keystrokes without modifiers to actions, so it consumes some text that you’ve typed and does some things to your mailbox.
I’ve had these freezes on linux, mostly when thunderbird has been running for a month or more. I tried to investigate and found out that in my case, they were caused by garbage collection. The code causing the allocations seemed very bad (objects were being duplicated because the original object had a patched prototype, but the code needed to have access to a patch-free prototype at some point) but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
How large are your mailboxes? It is probably related to that, since it got less common when I switched to Maildir (it’s basically unusable with mbox). I suspect it’s something to do with the on-demand virus scanner and blocking I/O.
Although it sometimes feels like a bag full of sharp edges, I’m glad that there’s still life in the Thunderbird project.
Personally pleased that CardDAV address book support has arrived. One of those things that I had assumed Thunderbird had until I tried to find it a few months ago.
how so ?
This is just one bug, but maybe an example – Thunderbird sets its own timezone in its configs, and sets a default to Pacific while ignoring the timezone on the OS (?) Then shows calendar invites with no time zone indication! It’s as if it was engineered to get people to miss meetings. Those bugs, with many others, are sitting in the bug tracker and have been there a long time.
that’s something I never noticed, but I’m using it primarily for email
Just to add to the list of issues: I have a workflow in Thunderbird where I will sort by sender and triage my e-mail, often repeatedly hitting the ‘a’ key to archive a bunch of keys from the same sender. This works great, but obviously you sometimes end up archiving a mail you didn’t mean to this way. That’s fine, Thunderbird has a shortcut ctrl+z to undo archiving an e-mail. But after you hit that shortcut, it takes a pretty long time for the e-mail to show up in the e-mail list again. You would expect the e-mail to just immediately appear again when you undo archiving it, but no. I suspect the way it works is that there’s a disconnect between the UI and the data model; in the model, the e-mail is immediately un-archived, but the change to the model doesn’t immediately update the UI to reflect that.
I suppose a general feeling of jank and lack of polish, especially when it comes to the calendar and address book. It feels like different parts of the app have been developed at very different paces (which is true) so there’s less consistency to the interfaces than you might expect and it can be hard to find where one toggle this particular setting etc.
As an example, I mentioned how I’m pleased at the introduction of CardDAV support but have so far been unable to find where exactly it lives…
I’m using it for email mostly, but I did switch away to kmail on linux after it killed its own search index every second day 3 years ago, leading to glitchy search results. And I’ve had it once on a system that the imap account didn’t have any trash bin anymore, which leads to the issue that you actually can’t delete anything anymore. But these are just two issues that I’ve had once in 8 years.
Thunderbird’s search is unreliable/incomplete though. For searches I use the web client of our mail host. Otherwise I often won’t find what I’m looking for.
The quick filter is the only usable search in Thunderbird.
On Windows, the UI will freeze for several seconds in the middle of typing and when it resumes it will sometimes randomly move focus to another window before processing the rest of the input buffer. Normally this is mildly annoying but the main window binds some keystrokes without modifiers to actions, so it consumes some text that you’ve typed and does some things to your mailbox.
I’ve never had any freezes for typing some mail, only very slow reactions when you’re moving a lot of mail.
I’ve had these freezes on linux, mostly when thunderbird has been running for a month or more. I tried to investigate and found out that in my case, they were caused by garbage collection. The code causing the allocations seemed very bad (objects were being duplicated because the original object had a patched prototype, but the code needed to have access to a patch-free prototype at some point) but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
How large are your mailboxes? It is probably related to that, since it got less common when I switched to Maildir (it’s basically unusable with mbox). I suspect it’s something to do with the on-demand virus scanner and blocking I/O.
Is mbox even available as an option for new accounts? That seems like a terrible idea…
Unless it’s changed in the last few months, it’s the default.
I’ve noticed that mozilla isn’t pushing out 91 to users of 78. Anyone know the reason for that?
It would be amazing if they added a proper conversation view! Although a pretty nice update.