9 ms·

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the m

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.

asdajksah2123 4y ago
The issue is indeed "Why Thunderbird takes so long to change" (the visual representation of this development problem is it's old looking UI). If Thunderbird was easy to develop and modify then all the performance issues you're talking about would be resolved. The problem is that Thunderbird's legacy code base makes making changes extremely difficult, slow and risky. And that's Thunderbird's fundamental problem as the article describes well.
npigrounet 4y ago
[dead]
jahsome 4y ago
You drastically overestimate the general software consumer. Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI. But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  In one of the previous threads someone suggested betterbird and I've been using it ever since[1]. It doesn't fix the age old default search output, but it works comparably well for my taste. It also doesn't fix the idle CPU usage unfortunately. [1] https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable
miroljub 4y ago
I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast, especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me, so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear in multiple folders without affecting performance. I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I remember it was crazy fast I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware. I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk. Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.
  - jeltz 4y ago
    It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but the performance is really horrific.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood? When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.
      - mmcgaha 4y ago
        I have never used thunderbird but I am sure a lot changed when when xul went away.
        4y ago
Sniffnoy 4y ago
The main issue with Thunderbird IMO is that line-wrapping and quoting (and especially their interaction) during composition is horrifically buggy!
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I never had that issue myself. But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102). Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.
- alisonatwork 4y ago
  I actually just switched to Thunderbird last year because I needed to post a patch to a mailing list and I couldn't find any mail apps for Windows that could do it properly. Previously I used Alpine, but that was a much worse experience because pasting didn't work so I had to clumsily read in a prepared file from disk and not touch any other keys after that for fear of it rewrapping everything. If there are any other mail apps that do this better, and can still connect to "modern" (read: annoying) oauth setups like Office365 etc, I'd definitely be interested in trying them. I don't hate Thunderbird, but to me it seems like the least bad option for supporting both modern top-quote style HTML email and oldskool 7 bit ASCII/triangle bracket quoting/inline patch style email.
jeltz 4y ago
Yes, I love the UI of Thunderbird and its superior UI is the only reason I still use it despite the horrific performance issues.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Same. I wouldn't put up with this from any other app. In the last few months it has taken to seizing up for 2-10 seconds at a time in the middle of writing. I've been holding out hope a new release will magically get better. Or that I'll dig deep into what's going on and figure out what the cause is. But switching over to webmail is getting more and more tempting.
tux3 4y ago
That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the user. I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on. The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to be sitting idle.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.) Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    There are a lot of qualifiers there. The linked post by Thunderbird’s Product Design manager spends a lot of time talking about tech debt and feature availability, and not so much about problems with the interface. Indeed, it has a reassuring amount of respect for the current interface, describing a future that "allow[s] veteran users to maintain that familiarity they love". It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true, but i think its overstated. To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become the off-brand version of whoever is the market leader. That annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
> ... so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab [and] load Google Mail Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an already running browser is faster than starting a web browser albatross afresh. Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes well.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  > Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. Wouldn't that only make sense if your Gmail tab wasn't also loading up the same CSS?
- jeltz 4y ago
  Nope, the issues seem to lie more in just plain bad code. It is seems to be mostly their IMAP code and their mbox code which goes crazy and starts using all CPU, not the UI. The issues happen when opening folders too.
GordonS 4y ago
I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine? My issues were: - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing features - for example, I can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!
- wielebny 4y ago
  > no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin It seems that Thunderbird supports O365 oauth natively now, including access to calendars. I know I had to use some plugins in the past, but now, it just works.
  - GordonS 4y ago
    Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      at the very least, check which version you're on. The auto-updater is one of the parts that's unreliable.
      - throw0101a 4y ago
        * https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/01/important-message-for-microsoft-office-365-enterprise-users/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/01/important-message-for-m... * https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbird-for-modern-authentication/ https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbir... If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.
neogodless 4y ago
Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB. It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking." But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.
- Accacin 4y ago
  Same, I have a pretty decent gaming PC. Only about 1GB of mail in my archive from what I can see though. Uses %1.5 of my 32G of RAM and 0.2% CPU. I'm running on Linux, but I do not see the performance issues others are having.
- mrpotato 4y ago
  I am seeing similar results. That being said, I'm only using thunderbird on Windows, so I can't speak to Mac/Linux perf.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    I've used it on Linux since 2005 at least, and my only problems were importing a big Outlook .pst and having trouble with its formatting and attachments. It's open daily on my machine, and while it has become more memory hungry, the CPU usage is minimum. Maybe it's because I only use POP/SMTP accounts?
  - neogodless 4y ago
    On my Ryzen 7 4800H (8 core) 16GB laptop running Linux Mint, Thunderbird Mail is using 290MB-360MB of RAM. Mostly no registered CPU usage, but when I clicked around a few folders, it went up to about 3% very briefly.
- Gare 4y ago
  > It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking." You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.
djha-skin 4y ago
A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere that this speed difference is due to antivirus.
- jeltz 4y ago
  I run it on Linux and I have issues there.
riedel 4y ago
I guess 'notable' means something like >= 0.01% in this case. But tech debt is an issue if nobody can effectively fork off anything if unhappy with the direction taken.
ryanisnan 4y ago
I wonder how many thunderbird devs read HN - I would guess a lot. It really sounds like they are focused the wrong problems with the rebuild.
spoils19 4y ago
It's crazy that it's slower than an Electron app! Like most HNers, I fully believe that any JavaScript is slower than native, so how can this be false for this app???
- pmontra 4y ago
  The post said that Thunderbird is an app running on top of Firefox, so it's not much different than an Electron app. There are probably many more layers than a native one. Slowness is too new expected but actually I never felt that Thunderbird is slow. I use it daily.
- Narishma 4y ago
  Thunderbird is not native. It's built on top of Firefox. As such, it's not that different from an Electron app.
ktm5j 4y ago
I feel like you could argue that UI performance falls under the "look so old" statement.
- Narishma 4y ago
  Modern UIs are more likely to be slow and laggy compared to old ones.
cbmuser 4y ago
Yep, just recently switched to Evolution which is considerably faster and has a nicely working calender.
dhdgrygev 4y ago
I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance. For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings. Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that parts of the window sometimes flash for seemingly no reason when it is left open for a while.
- sdnas211 4y ago
  Outlook is very slow for me, but I only use it on my work laptop. Thunderbird is almost as slow, and that's on my own desktop. Even something simple like mousing over emails in the list is slow - there is a noticable delay between the mouse reaching each email, and the grey highlight.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I moved from claws-mail (because O365 now requires oauth and non-thunderbird experience with it is absolutely fucking awful) and it is noticeable slower. Not enough to call it "slow" tho, it is pretty snappy
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    I like that. I hate optimistic UIs that tell me something has happened when it clearly is just on a queue somewhere.
  - geokon 4y ago
    I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process But.. it seems like a solveable problem..
hedora 4y ago
I miss the old UI (from like 20 years ago). I switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use. Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.
- efreak 4y ago
  SeaMonkey is still around. Dunno if they've changed the UI recently, but it was still the same old thing secretary years ago.
emodendroket 4y ago
The search is also shamefully bad.
ratiolat 4y ago
I've hit "Thunderbird is slow" many times and it has turned out that the reason is that GMail is applying rate limiting. I originally switched from Apple mail because I thought Apple mail could not handle my gmail. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en
- efreak 4y ago
  Gmail has all sorts of limits people don't realize, including a limit on the number of incoming emails (1/s, which does seem pretty reasonable).
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I have multiple mailboxes, which are quite large. Never saw a performance problem at all and I am dumbfounded what could be the issue for people. Its speed and ease of use is why I prefer it to web mail by a large margin. It starts quicker than my browser too.
kieckerjan 4y ago
This! On my Xubuntu installation(s) the rendering has become so slow to almost be unusable. There were some helpful tips floating around to remedy this situation (turning off webrender seemed to help) but these have stopped working as well. I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

The issue is indeed "Why Thunderbird takes so long to change" (the visual representation of this development problem is it's old looking UI). If Thunderbird was easy to develop and modify then all the performance issues you're talking about would be resolved. The problem is that Thunderbird's legacy code base makes making changes extremely difficult, slow and risky. And that's Thunderbird's fundamental problem as the article describes well.

npigrounet 4y ago

[dead]

jahsome 4y ago

You drastically overestimate the general software consumer. Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI. But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"

rjzzleep 4y ago
In one of the previous threads someone suggested betterbird and I've been using it ever since[1]. It doesn't fix the age old default search output, but it works comparably well for my taste. It also doesn't fix the idle CPU usage unfortunately. [1] https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable

miroljub 4y ago

I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast, especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me, so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear in multiple folders without affecting performance. I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...

reaperducer 4y ago
I remember it was crazy fast I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware. I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk. Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.
- jeltz 4y ago
  It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but the performance is really horrific.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood? When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.
    - mmcgaha 4y ago
      I have never used thunderbird but I am sure a lot changed when when xul went away.
      - 4y ago

Sniffnoy 4y ago

The main issue with Thunderbird IMO is that line-wrapping and quoting (and especially their interaction) during composition is horrifically buggy!

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I never had that issue myself. But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102). Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.
alisonatwork 4y ago
I actually just switched to Thunderbird last year because I needed to post a patch to a mailing list and I couldn't find any mail apps for Windows that could do it properly. Previously I used Alpine, but that was a much worse experience because pasting didn't work so I had to clumsily read in a prepared file from disk and not touch any other keys after that for fear of it rewrapping everything. If there are any other mail apps that do this better, and can still connect to "modern" (read: annoying) oauth setups like Office365 etc, I'd definitely be interested in trying them. I don't hate Thunderbird, but to me it seems like the least bad option for supporting both modern top-quote style HTML email and oldskool 7 bit ASCII/triangle bracket quoting/inline patch style email.

jeltz 4y ago

Yes, I love the UI of Thunderbird and its superior UI is the only reason I still use it despite the horrific performance issues.

wpietri 4y ago
Same. I wouldn't put up with this from any other app. In the last few months it has taken to seizing up for 2-10 seconds at a time in the middle of writing. I've been holding out hope a new release will magically get better. Or that I'll dig deep into what's going on and figure out what the cause is. But switching over to webmail is getting more and more tempting.

tux3 4y ago

That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the user. I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on. The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to be sitting idle.

throw0101a 4y ago
> That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.) Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.
- roenxi 4y ago
  There are a lot of qualifiers there. The linked post by Thunderbird’s Product Design manager spends a lot of time talking about tech debt and feature availability, and not so much about problems with the interface. Indeed, it has a reassuring amount of respect for the current interface, describing a future that "allow[s] veteran users to maintain that familiarity they love". It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true, but i think its overstated. To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become the off-brand version of whoever is the market leader. That annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

> ... so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab [and] load Google Mail Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an already running browser is faster than starting a web browser albatross afresh. Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes well.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
> Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. Wouldn't that only make sense if your Gmail tab wasn't also loading up the same CSS?
jeltz 4y ago
Nope, the issues seem to lie more in just plain bad code. It is seems to be mostly their IMAP code and their mbox code which goes crazy and starts using all CPU, not the UI. The issues happen when opening folders too.

GordonS 4y ago

I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine? My issues were: - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing features - for example, I can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!

wielebny 4y ago
> no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin It seems that Thunderbird supports O365 oauth natively now, including access to calendars. I know I had to use some plugins in the past, but now, it just works.
- GordonS 4y ago
  Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    at the very least, check which version you're on. The auto-updater is one of the parts that's unreliable.
    - throw0101a 4y ago
      * https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/01/important-message-for-microsoft-office-365-enterprise-users/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/01/important-message-for-m... * https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbird-for-modern-authentication/ https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbir... If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.

neogodless 4y ago

Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB. It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking." But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.

Accacin 4y ago
Same, I have a pretty decent gaming PC. Only about 1GB of mail in my archive from what I can see though. Uses %1.5 of my 32G of RAM and 0.2% CPU. I'm running on Linux, but I do not see the performance issues others are having.
mrpotato 4y ago
I am seeing similar results. That being said, I'm only using thunderbird on Windows, so I can't speak to Mac/Linux perf.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I've used it on Linux since 2005 at least, and my only problems were importing a big Outlook .pst and having trouble with its formatting and attachments. It's open daily on my machine, and while it has become more memory hungry, the CPU usage is minimum. Maybe it's because I only use POP/SMTP accounts?
- neogodless 4y ago
  On my Ryzen 7 4800H (8 core) 16GB laptop running Linux Mint, Thunderbird Mail is using 290MB-360MB of RAM. Mostly no registered CPU usage, but when I clicked around a few folders, it went up to about 3% very briefly.
Gare 4y ago
> It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking." You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.

djha-skin 4y ago

A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere that this speed difference is due to antivirus.

jeltz 4y ago
I run it on Linux and I have issues there.

riedel 4y ago

I guess 'notable' means something like >= 0.01% in this case. But tech debt is an issue if nobody can effectively fork off anything if unhappy with the direction taken.

ryanisnan 4y ago

I wonder how many thunderbird devs read HN - I would guess a lot. It really sounds like they are focused the wrong problems with the rebuild.

spoils19 4y ago

It's crazy that it's slower than an Electron app! Like most HNers, I fully believe that any JavaScript is slower than native, so how can this be false for this app???

pmontra 4y ago
The post said that Thunderbird is an app running on top of Firefox, so it's not much different than an Electron app. There are probably many more layers than a native one. Slowness is too new expected but actually I never felt that Thunderbird is slow. I use it daily.
Narishma 4y ago
Thunderbird is not native. It's built on top of Firefox. As such, it's not that different from an Electron app.

ktm5j 4y ago

I feel like you could argue that UI performance falls under the "look so old" statement.

Narishma 4y ago
Modern UIs are more likely to be slow and laggy compared to old ones.

cbmuser 4y ago

Yep, just recently switched to Evolution which is considerably faster and has a nicely working calender.

dhdgrygev 4y ago

I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance. For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings. Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that parts of the window sometimes flash for seemingly no reason when it is left open for a while.

sdnas211 4y ago
Outlook is very slow for me, but I only use it on my work laptop. Thunderbird is almost as slow, and that's on my own desktop. Even something simple like mousing over emails in the list is slow - there is a noticable delay between the mouse reaching each email, and the grey highlight.
ilyt 4y ago
I moved from claws-mail (because O365 now requires oauth and non-thunderbird experience with it is absolutely fucking awful) and it is noticeable slower. Not enough to call it "slow" tho, it is pretty snappy
lawgimenez 4y ago
In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.
- SahAssar 4y ago
  I like that. I hate optimistic UIs that tell me something has happened when it clearly is just on a queue somewhere.
- geokon 4y ago
  I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process But.. it seems like a solveable problem..

hedora 4y ago

I miss the old UI (from like 20 years ago). I switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use. Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.

efreak 4y ago
SeaMonkey is still around. Dunno if they've changed the UI recently, but it was still the same old thing secretary years ago.

emodendroket 4y ago

The search is also shamefully bad.

ratiolat 4y ago

I've hit "Thunderbird is slow" many times and it has turned out that the reason is that GMail is applying rate limiting. I originally switched from Apple mail because I thought Apple mail could not handle my gmail. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en

efreak 4y ago
Gmail has all sorts of limits people don't realize, including a limit on the number of incoming emails (1/s, which does seem pretty reasonable).

raxxorraxor 4y ago

I have multiple mailboxes, which are quite large. Never saw a performance problem at all and I am dumbfounded what could be the issue for people. Its speed and ease of use is why I prefer it to web mail by a large margin. It starts quicker than my browser too.

kieckerjan 4y ago

This! On my Xubuntu installation(s) the rendering has become so slow to almost be unusable. There were some helpful tips floating around to remedy this situation (turning off webrender seemed to help) but these have stopped working as well. I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.