Re: Why Peter Moylan went back from Thunderbird 3 to Thunderbird 2
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard
>>>
>>> I tried Thunderbird 3 for several weeks, trying to keep my
>>> irritation under control, but eventually ran screaming back to
>>> Thunderbird 2. [...]
>>>
>> What sort of stupid ideas? I use Thunderbird only on my Ubuntu
>> machine, and Ubuntu doesn't yet support version 3. [...]
>>
> Well, that's interesting. It's not often that the OS/2 version of a
> new program is released well before the Ubuntu version.
>
> I've forgotten some of the things that bothered me. One that still
> sticks in my mind is the use of tabs.
>
> Tabs were a great idea when they were introduced into Firefox, and I
> couldn't do without them. Someone obviously decided that they are such
> a good idea that Thunderbird should have them too. [...] It ends up
> being an idea looking for a use, and failing to find one. [...] Of
> course, anyone who doesn't like tabs can simply not use that feature.
> Even so, it bothered me that somebody obviously went to a lot of
> effort to create something without ever asking whether it was good for
> anything.
>
Tabs are definitely fashion items nowadays, that every application in
the world has to have. There are some pretty poor things about them in
Thunderbird, not the least of which is that changing the focus between
multiple tabs resets the scroll positions to the tops of each message.
There are other things relating to tabs that you didn't mention: Tabs
cannot be re-ordered. For some magic UI reason, one can read in a tab
but not write in one. Don't whatever you do open the same news account
in multiple tabs, because the multiple overlapping background article
header reading processes will interfere with each other. (The same goes
for the background header reading and any foreground reading started by
"rebuild index" in the current newsgroup's properties.) And sometimes
newsgroups with new messages will be displayed in the "new messages
here" colour, but only if that was noticed in another tab.
> You might think that you could have one tab for each mail account, and
> one for newsgroups, or something like that, but that idea is ruined by
> the fact that all tabs share the same left pane (the one with accounts
> and folders), so the tabs don't have the degree of independence that
> they would need to be useful. [...]
>
Now that would be a welcome feature.
> To get that effect you'd have to run multiple copies of the overall
> program, giving separate windows rather than separate tabs.
>
... and which the program goes to significant lengths to prevent one
from doing in the first place. (-: The Win16 Think of single-instance
applications lives on.
> Another design change: the buttons for things like "reply" and
> "forward" are in the article window rather than the main window. [...]
> I would have liked the option to put the buttons back where they used
> to be.
>
... and the "reply" button doesn't even have all of the reply options.
There's a menu option called "Always show Reply to Sender", but it's
just there to tease one. It has no actual effect on the "reply" button
in a news message.
Putting the buttons back is done with "Customize toolbar", apparently.
Well, half of it is. One can have the buttons back on the toolbar, but
one cannot get rid of the new ones in the headers pane, it seems.
>
> The newsreader part was very obviously not tested before release.
>
"nobody except me reads usenet any more." — Paul Vixie, 2010-02-24
You're a figment of our imagination. So stop complaining that you
cannot read Usenet properly with Thunderbird 3.
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard
>>
>> No doubt I was also influenced by the very serious bugs in the
>> initial release. (Threading was faulty, and a few other things I've
>> now forgotten. The newsreader part was very obviously not tested
>> before release.) Presumably that has been fixed by now, but I won't
>> bother looking unless someone tells me that the design changes have
>> been reversed.
>>
> I had occasion to look at newsgroups in TB3 a day or two ago. Don't
> bother looking :-)
>
> E.g., I saw this more than once:
>
> Re: Some subject 14:00 April 1 2010
> Some subject 11:00 March 31 2010
>
That sort of thing is the default for a newsgroup when threading is not
switched on. The default for each freshly subscribed newsgroup is to
sort by order received — i.e. article order on your NNTP server, which
is purely message arrival order for that Usenet node, and in which
out-of-thread-order arrival such as that is commonplace. Of course, you
won't know that this is the sort order that you are seeing until you
tell Thunderbird to display the order received column, which is hidden
by default. (-: