5 ms·

I use Thunderbird, and have for a very long time. Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it les

by mkl 5y ago

I use Thunderbird, and have for a very long time. Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on. Bizarrely, the donation page thinks I'm in the UK, when I'm almost as far as possible away from there.

unixhero 5y ago
Lemme guess, Australia!?
- mkl 5y ago
  Further!
  - signal11 5y ago
    New Zealand?
    - mkl 5y ago
      Yep.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
IP-based geolocation is a crapshoot. I frequently get teleported to Eastern Europe, Finland, USA, or Canada, despite living very far from all of them.
- mkl 5y ago
  In practice I've found it works pretty well. Every geolocation service I've tried (just did 6-7 now) gets my country right, and more than half get the city/region. I've always had it get online students' locations right too.
_zamorano_ 5y ago
Spaniard here. The donation page thinks I'm mexican. Changed to es-ES but didn't work at the first time. The paypal link seems to do nothing. Tried browsing from google.es and again it was set to Mexico, though this time I was able to donate after changing to Spain.
pizza234 5y ago
> Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on. I have very strong suspicions about the engineering quality of their work (but can't confirm). With the recent version, v78, they did broke extensions again, however, something very smell is the policy that they've adopted - the new replacement APIs are incomplete and experimental (see https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb78 https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb78): > While the Thunderbird team plans to add more APIs with upcoming releases, the current set of APIs will not be sufficient to port most add-ons. To work around this limitation, add-ons can introduce their own, additional APIs as so-called Experiments. > As Experiments usually run in the main process and have unrestricted access to any aspect of Thunderbird, they are expected to require updates for each new version of Thunderbird. To reduce the maintenance burden in the future, it is in your own interest to use Experiment APIs only to the extent necessary for the add-on. Essentially, they've broken compatibility by introducing a half-baked framework, and guaranteed that compatibility will be broken again and again. I don't have the technical insight to know if this is really necessary (I know that in the past, breaking compatibility was a necessity in some cases), but on the outside, this looks like terrible, careless, engineering.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Maybe they just lack the resources to do all that work.

by mkl 5y ago

unixhero 5y ago

Lemme guess, Australia!?

mkl 5y ago
Further!
- signal11 5y ago
  New Zealand?
  - mkl 5y ago
    Yep.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago

IP-based geolocation is a crapshoot. I frequently get teleported to Eastern Europe, Finland, USA, or Canada, despite living very far from all of them.

mkl 5y ago
In practice I've found it works pretty well. Every geolocation service I've tried (just did 6-7 now) gets my country right, and more than half get the city/region. I've always had it get online students' locations right too.

_zamorano_ 5y ago

Spaniard here. The donation page thinks I'm mexican. Changed to es-ES but didn't work at the first time. The paypal link seems to do nothing. Tried browsing from google.es and again it was set to Mexico, though this time I was able to donate after changing to Spain.

pizza234 5y ago

> Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on. I have very strong suspicions about the engineering quality of their work (but can't confirm). With the recent version, v78, they did broke extensions again, however, something very smell is the policy that they've adopted - the new replacement APIs are incomplete and experimental (see https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb78 https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb78): > While the Thunderbird team plans to add more APIs with upcoming releases, the current set of APIs will not be sufficient to port most add-ons. To work around this limitation, add-ons can introduce their own, additional APIs as so-called Experiments. > As Experiments usually run in the main process and have unrestricted access to any aspect of Thunderbird, they are expected to require updates for each new version of Thunderbird. To reduce the maintenance burden in the future, it is in your own interest to use Experiment APIs only to the extent necessary for the add-on. Essentially, they've broken compatibility by introducing a half-baked framework, and guaranteed that compatibility will be broken again and again. I don't have the technical insight to know if this is really necessary (I know that in the past, breaking compatibility was a necessity in some cases), but on the outside, this looks like terrible, careless, engineering.

wolverine876 5y ago
Maybe they just lack the resources to do all that work.