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Comment by inanutshellus | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what the fuss is about. They made rather minor changes overall and gave the app a bit of a facelift. I personally like the changes (for example putting the keyboard shortcuts in the search bars... I don't recall them being there so prominently, but I like the reminder when I forget, and it doesn't get in the way when I don't.) Regardless, we cannot let stagnation be the answer.

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After the big update I had to spend an hour restoring it to a functional state including changing an about:config parameter to get the scaling right. Out of the box I got changes that broke my UI and no "beautiful" new UI to begin with (you need to actively change settings to convert). Also there is still a giant clonky Win98 scrollbar on my folders, so getting that clean look in the marketing screenshots is impossible unless I severely reduce folders so I don't need the scrollbar. Why the scrollbar wasn't replaced with something more modern? No clue.

Two things:

1. the designers never considered keyboard navigation, which is now even more awkward than it was already

2. the interface is now very visibly slower - startup and general usage (on two of my systems)

This ignores the very long standing issues like:

1. searching is very confusing; there are several different types of searches

2. writing an email still requires opening another window. compose emails like it's the 90s!

It never occurred to me that I should not open a new window to compose an email. How would that work? Displace the folder I'm in, or the message I'm looking at? And why?

It should do it in a new tab. There have been discussions about it, but all the attempts have been abandoned due to spaghetti code.

My Thunderbird window is not full screen but it's larger than the mail composition one. I can use that extra screen space to look at other things while I write a message. Short messages go through WhatsApp and Telegram nowadays. Outbound email is for important matters, so it's not uncommon to look at reference material. A tab wouldn't do.

Inbound email is 99.9% notifications. I read and delete most of them with K9 on my phone before downloading what's left with Thunderbird. BTW my mailbox is on a POP3 server. I clear it after downloading the messages.

Thunderbird, like Firefox, already supports detaching tabs into new windows.

Why? I kinda like composing in a new window. I may want to read another email while replying to the current one.

I think the only prominent UI change that happened is that the bar that holds the search box, Write button etc is above the tab bar now instead of below.

Personally, I find it a bit jarring, because contextually, that bar only contains stuff related to mail, but that bar and some stuff on it continues to appear even when I switch to Calendar. Thankfully, some CSS takes care of this.

Otherwise, it is a quite nice change. Dark mode now also applies to mail contents as well, which is a great change, though I would like a shortcut to swap to light mode.

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