19
votes
Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” is here
Link information
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- Title
- Our Fastest, Most Beautiful Release Ever: Thunderbird 115 "Supernova" Is Here!
- Authors
- Jason Evangelho
- Published
- Jul 11 2023
- Word count
- 834 words
I gave it an upgrade! I've used Thunderbird for years and years; glad to see it still going strong.
This upgrade might get me back. Used to use Thunderbird a decade ago. It lost me for other reasons I don't remember anymore somewhere in there. Tried to come back sometime in the last couple years, and the design hadn't changed since the early 2010s, so it stuck out from everything else on my (GNOME) desktop like a sore thumb and was generally not something I could really look at. I assumed this was something that was solvable with themes, but to my surprise when I opened the theme store, the community themes were also the same ones from 2010. Windows 7 style frosted glass panes with reflection, and flames, and ... pictures of space, or whatever. Everyone remembers what the browser themes were like back then. It was enough to convince me Thunderbird just wasn't being used by anyone who wasn't stuck in the past.
It definitely has a more "modern" feel that fits more into my Windows 10 desktop. There was also a style refresh not too long ago; that was long overdue as well.
At some point I did try other email clients (very first? Opera, back in the day!) but I always eventually returned to Thunderbird. It was just so reliable for me.
I upgraded despite being apprehensive based on their preview.
First impression was that it looks... bad. The spacing wasn't coherent; some screens haven't been updated to their new design language; the menu bar looks just out-of-place. It kind of reminds me how Windows 11 has Control Panel screens from Windows 10, Windows XP, and even Windows 2000 hiding in the depths.
As I tinkered with it a little, I realized that they carried across all my existing settings in-place, and that some of the defaults were not super sensible. It defaulted to condensed spacing, but with a font slightly too large for that spacing. Fixing those made the design look more "correct", but the app does seem to follow the trend of putting superfluous whitespace where none is really needed.
So it seems that although they provide the tools for "compact view" and font size preferences, unless you use something pretty close to their hero shots, the application won't really look quite correct. For example, they really want you to use their new hamburger menu, so the traditional menu bar is clearly an afterthought now. This can be fixed with another polish pass I'm sure.
The actual feature changes are pretty light. Overall I'd say that the update is a bit overblown, but hopefully they did some architecture cleanup and that'll help development speed going forward.
The new Unified Folder stuff is cool, but they should have taken more hints from K-9's implementation, where you can select which folders are bubbled up to the Unified Inbox. It's too overwhelming as-is even though I'd like to use it.
yeah, I just upgraded this morning (had to redownload it from the site since the in-app update checker wasn't showing it) and it was all super cramped and I had to reduce the density.
unified folders are the reason I've used Thunderbird from the beginning, but now for some reason it hides my iCloud folder (I should probably just re-add the account)
but yeah, I agree that it's a little bit overblown, the update, that is...but it's nice that they're refreshing their design in these days of Outlook going web-only or something like that