3 ms·

I've been running thunderbird for what, ~20 years now? Its a love/hate relationship. I curse it almost daily, but have issues with most of the alternatives as w

I've been running thunderbird for what, ~20 years now? Its a love/hate relationship. I curse it almost daily, but have issues with most of the alternatives as well. So, I was excited about the fact that thunderbird was going to get some attention, and was even going to throw some $ at them. Then I read their planning/backlog https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap-1 https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap-1 and things I simply could not agree with poped out at me, particularly the plan (now partially done?) to reimplement the IMAP support in javascript. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707547 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707547 The IMAP support is one of the weakest things about thunderbird, because its horribly slow, buggy, doesn't scale, etc, etc, etc. And frankly I cannot see how rewritting in it JS will solve any of that. What it needs is IMAP support that can sync lots of folders and doesn't peg CPUs (which is already a problem) while doing it. My own biases seeing what others have accomplished with their JS rewrites (usually electron, so maybe that is part of the problem) give me a very low opinion of them. So, I will give it a chance, but I predict it won't work with my mailflow out of the box, and generally will make everything even worse, and the developers will ignore those of us that get more than 1k worth of emails in a day. (I mean look where firefox has gone, I can't even get it to draw pages consistently, and its not the platform/computer because I see it doing the same buggy behaviors on my linux and windows machines. I've even resurected my firefox kill all scripts because that seems to "fix" it for another 1/2 day until it goes bonkers again).

tristan957 4y ago
I use Firefox every day and never have problems. As far as JS for IMAP, I seriously think that the developers of Thunderbird would understand the pros and cons of using it more than those of us sitting in the peanut gallery. I would bet that if it was implemented without any fanfare, you probably would not notice anything.
- StillBored 4y ago
  As far as JS for IMAP, I seriously think that the developers of Thunderbird would understand the pros and cons of using it more than those of us sitting in the peanut gallery. Maybe, but from what I've seen of the average JavaScript developer, and what spidermonkey does under heavy load, I doubt it. The one saving grace is probably the fact that as it is today, thunderbird (despite my issues with it) is fully capable of maxing out many of the commercial email/IMAP providers (cough o365 for one, which throttles it). So, those of us which have it in the middle of a development workflow and have tens of GB's of emails sitting in our inboxes are a minority. Also, given that over the past ~30 years, I've been been a primary engineer/etc on a half dozen+ major projects that had high perf networking components, I can safely say that I wouldn't want to go into any of those battles with the javascript threading and IO model because we would have either failed, or ended up using 100x the hardware, which would have been the same thing as failing in most cases. So, peering at my crystal ball, I would guess what actually happens is that they roll it out, 9 out of 10 of their users don't notice the change, and the remaining couple percent that are the ones complaining about it now, end up leaving because its worse. I've already found another client I think i can "fix" enough to make it work.

tristan957 4y ago

I use Firefox every day and never have problems. As far as JS for IMAP, I seriously think that the developers of Thunderbird would understand the pros and cons of using it more than those of us sitting in the peanut gallery. I would bet that if it was implemented without any fanfare, you probably would not notice anything.

StillBored 4y ago
As far as JS for IMAP, I seriously think that the developers of Thunderbird would understand the pros and cons of using it more than those of us sitting in the peanut gallery. Maybe, but from what I've seen of the average JavaScript developer, and what spidermonkey does under heavy load, I doubt it. The one saving grace is probably the fact that as it is today, thunderbird (despite my issues with it) is fully capable of maxing out many of the commercial email/IMAP providers (cough o365 for one, which throttles it). So, those of us which have it in the middle of a development workflow and have tens of GB's of emails sitting in our inboxes are a minority. Also, given that over the past ~30 years, I've been been a primary engineer/etc on a half dozen+ major projects that had high perf networking components, I can safely say that I wouldn't want to go into any of those battles with the javascript threading and IO model because we would have either failed, or ended up using 100x the hardware, which would have been the same thing as failing in most cases. So, peering at my crystal ball, I would guess what actually happens is that they roll it out, 9 out of 10 of their users don't notice the change, and the remaining couple percent that are the ones complaining about it now, end up leaving because its worse. I've already found another client I think i can "fix" enough to make it work.