5 ms·

I've switched to Thunderbird after hearing about this a couple of weeks ago. I simply do not want yet another WebView/Electron-based application on my machine.

I've switched to Thunderbird after hearing about this a couple of weeks ago. I simply do not want yet another WebView/Electron-based application on my machine. They feel slow and out of place compared to native applications. Microsoft, in the past 10 years, have failed to provide a good UI option for developers. WinForms is legacy. WPF is legacy. WinRT is dead. UWP is dead. MAUI is a mess. WinUI looks to be either abandoned or not getting enough attention to make it a viable option. From the above, it is understandable why teams in MS are building new products with Web tech. The Windows team should consider this a failure because Windows now has no good, viable option for GUI development.

tmikaeld 3y ago
The native views of thunderbird are wonderfully performant, especially when browsing thousands of e-mails in lists and sorting through them. I'd never be able to go back to scrolling with "skeleton rows" that's the web default because it can't render fast enough..
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  What's funny is that Thunderbird UI is not native. It uses XUL which is Mozilla's version of something like Electron that has existed since before Electron was even conceived as an idea. That it feels like a native application shows just how really shit Electron is.
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    I think the interesting part about XUL and why I really enjoyed it back in the day is that it's what HTML-for-applications could have been. It's still a "document" in the way any XML is a "document", but the markup is way more application-focused than document-focused. But instead we keep using a markup language that's designed for documents and try our best to make it usable in a very not-a-document way. Edit: one detail I don't recall is what XUL actually uses for rendering components on-screen.
- codethief 3y ago
  > The native views of thunderbird are wonderfully performant Are we using the same Thunderbird? For me it feels rather sluggish.
  - ksec 3y ago
    99% of HN suggest VSCode is very fast, when Sublime exist. It is one reason why the other day we have a submission "Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened" Most people aren't latency sensitive. Or do not care about it enough. The world of computing has then settle of sluggish behaviour being the norm. As most are OK with it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933
    - FractalHQ 3y ago
      I’m pretty sure the apps do a lot more now than they did on windows XT. I wouldn’t build with Electron over something like Tauri+Svelte but I also don’t mind waiting 1 second for hundreds of great extensions and lsps to load once for a 4 hour session.
      - funcDropShadow 3y ago
        > I’m pretty sure the apps do a lot more now than they did on windows XT The question is whether that additional work is of any benefit to the user.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    Sluggish? It's near instantaneous at everything, except when it's doing network operations. It literally does a keyword stem search on a 4GB mailbox in under a 1/10 of a second. That's the fastest inverted index lookup I've ever seen - all accomplished with just sqlite. I consider it amazing. It makes the old version of Outlook look like a dog. A one legged dog. And the leg is broken. As others have noted, as soon at it has to access the network it slows down. A lot. And it you queue up enough operations, it can get confused - particularly if the network drops out in the middle and it has to re-sync everything. But it is imap, so I forgive it. To get it's native non-networked speed, you do have to ensure every folder is downloaded to local storage. Do that, and it's amazingly quick.
- pohuing 3y ago
  Provided thunderbird is finished fetching mails. Why that is happening on the ui thread is beyond me, but thunderbird is always frozen for a couple dozens seconds after opening it after a bunch of new mail came in.
rektide 3y ago
Vscode feels blitz fast. Which apps have you tried that feel slow?
- klodolph 3y ago
  VS Code is reasonably fast but it’s somewhat an exception in the world of slow Electron apps. I’ve seen performance issues with Slack and Discord. Spotify isn’t Electron, it’s CEF, but it has the same problems. The parts of Apple’s Music app which run inside the web view are noticeably worse than the other parts.
  - rektide 3y ago
    These two apps seem to be the number one and two most popular desktop-packaged webapps & they have done immeasurable damage to the perception of the web as a technology. It's cemented the perception of web desktop tech in many people's mind & I question whether it's possible to de-infect what has become a quite strongly held dogmatism. There's few apps broadly actually uses these days, so the opportunity is also troublingly slim. I want to ask, what are the contestible assertions, what would change your mind? But even for me it's hard to imagine finding sufficient leverage, having enough examples, to really challenge the negative perceptions. For what it's worth, discord load time is a bit obnoxious but I've found it to be pretty performant once loaded, and I'm a fairly intense user who is on many dozens of servers.
    - klodolph 3y ago
      Framing it as “dogmatism” is unfair. Most people just try to see what the various tradeoffs are between alternatives. For desktop apps, we’re talking about Electron versus, say, Qt, Cocoa, WPF, or whatever. The observation that web packaged apps are typically slower and typically have worse UIs is probably not being contested here. Likewise, the advantages of Electron for cutting costs and shipping apps faster is probably not being contested. I think the only real question people have is, “Do you care?” I used the desktop version of Discord for a few years. It seems like—well, a real piece of shit, to be honest. So I use the web client now. Performance is only really a problem when you scroll around, deep in the history of a channel. My point of reference is apps like Adium.
unregistereddev 3y ago
First, I agree. Microsoft has failed to provide a viable platform for native GUI development, and IMO there is still a place for native desktop applications. Part of the reason Windows stayed so prevalent for so long is its rich software ecosystem - arguably, an ecosystem that partially resulted from MS's focus on developers. However, there may be additional reasons for building new products with web tech. Someone already needs to maintain the web versions of these applications. If you're going to offer web access to Outlook, a team needs to be responsible for maintaining that web application. By replacing the native desktop app with a wrapper around their existing web application, Microsoft reduces the need to separately build and maintain features in both platforms.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > By replacing the native desktop app with a wrapper around their existing web application, Microsoft reduces the need to separately build and maintain features in both platforms. True, but it's at the price of having an inferior product. But perhaps Microsoft doesn't care about that.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    Microsoft built their whole business on providing inferior copies of other products, they never cared and never will.
SyneRyder 3y ago
Thunderbird is good, but I'll also suggest Postbox for people looking for alternatives. It's a commercial fork of Thunderbird (so about as "native" as Thunderbird is), but I find Postbox has a nicer UI, and at the time I switched its local email search was significantly faster. Layout is customizable, you're not restricted to the design (or theme) in their screenshots: https://www.postbox-inc.com/ It has some support for Thunderbird plugins. I use a self-modified version of h.ogi's Priority Switcher to bring back the user-editable priority column that Eudora used to have. (I don't understand how people can process their mail without sorting it by Priority....) Won't be for everyone - it's not open source, not free and there's no Linux version (yet?). Personally I'm happy to pay for a professional / premium email client experience, since it's so mission-critical to my work.
- AJ007 3y ago
  If you don't like the original Thunderbird UI, try the new Thunderbird Supernova - https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/ They are updating the UI, and doing a good job https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/thunderbird-115-supernova-preview-the-new-folder-pane/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/thunderbird-115-superno...
- V__ 3y ago
  I'm also a Postbox user and quite happy so far but I don't know if I would recommend it. Development seems to have stopped and Thunderbird is making good progress on the redesign.
AJ007 3y ago
Outlook's UI design by itself really is terrible. I don't know how so many people accept using it. I have a single business account I used Outlook for, switched to Thunderbird, and it is vastly less painful to use. I can find, read, and sort emails at least 3x quicker than with Outlook. Modern commercial UI/UX design really has drifted far away from "good." Photoshop suffers the same problem - 10 years ago the UI was quick, responsive, and efficient. Now it feels like wading through mud.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I don't know how so many people accept using it. Everyone I know who uses it only does so because their employers require them to.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    I've been using Outlook for .. wow over 25 years now. Early on it was an unstable crashy mess, but in the past 15 years it has been rock solid, reliable, and more than fast enough for anything I've ever done with it. I am ... not happy that the full client is slated to go away at some point in the future. I know Outlook well; I know how to wield it effectively and to make it behave in the way I want it to. I have a Macbook and a Windows desktop PC at work. Outlook on the Mac is a tire fire, and it is the new WebView2 version. Horrendous. For the moment, I can get something like the full Windows Outlook application via Outlook for the Web, which is saying a lot, because it itself is an extremely watered-down version of the full Outlook email client on Windows. Microsoft has been doing this a lot lately, and it's starting to make me a bit angry. They replace good stuff that they don't want to work on anymore with some web-enabled version or a version built on web technologies, which itself is a bad idea, even if the replacements were feature-complete compared to what they're replacing, but they're not. They're partial skeletons in comparison to what they're replacing. Toys. ALL of the advanced features that I have come to rely on in Outlook in the past 25 years are simply not present in Outlook for Mac. It's a bad trend and I don't see it stopping. In another decade, the apps we have now will be replaced with something else once someone at Microsoft once again gets it inside their head that it'll be better to rewrite rather than to adopt the existing code, and that version will be even slimmer and more useless than what's coming out today. We are choosing to make things worse every day and I do not understand it. I'm not saying that Outlook is a shining example of a good application, or that it is even in the top 10 email clients, I'm saying that I'm used to it and that I like it. It has continuously improved for 25 years and now it's slated to be replaced with a fucking webapp that's running locally. What in the world are people smoking thinking that ease of development is paramount to performance for applications which are very interaction-heavy? Typing text into Outlook for Mac on an M1 with 32GB of RAM is not instantaneous. FOR AN EMAIL APPLICATION. Unacceptable, but this is the route they're choosing because development is easier... I will never understand how web tech got so bad, and even if I do wind up understanding that, I will definitely not ever understand why people choose to use web technologies over things which have worked and have continually improved for decades.
AnonC 3y ago
Sadly, Thunderbird is becoming (or has become) a non-option in companies that use Outlook365/Microsoft365. Microsoft seems to have been quite effective in disabling IMAP and SMTP as a default in these tenants and scaring companies that even with OAuth2, these are insecure and not as safe as sticking with Outlook as the client. Companies (actually the information security teams) may be taking shortcuts based on Microsoft’s recommendations to reduce their work while imposing a huge cost on every worker. It used to be that companies were locked in with Windows and MS Office. But there were some alternative options for those. IMO, now companies are heavily locked in to Microsoft by subscribing to Microsoft365. There is no migrating out or exit path for this. They just have to suffer through whatever Microsoft puts them through.
- Propelloni 3y ago
  Well, there is Owl [1], which I have mentioned before. Of course, it is the old "chase the rabbit" game we know since the 2000s -- MS365 is just a faster moving target than Exchange on MS Windows Server. So far the devs have kept up well, I can count the instances I had to fall back to OWA on one hand over the last year. And I use it daily within my company. [1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en/thunderbird/addon/owl-for-exchange/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en/thunderbird/addon/owl-for-...
  - AnonC 3y ago
    Yes, I know there’s Owl as well as some other (non-Thunderbird) options. But at the higher level, the teams defining what protocols to allow or disallow also manage the policies. That’s what I meant by Microsoft (influencing and) locking in companies.
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
Well bloody good luck with that mate, I'm desperately looking to switch away from Thunderbird (started using it last year) and while I genuinely hate Microsoft (see many of my past posts), Outlook just plain works. Thunderbird has just been one bug after another.
vladvasiliu 3y ago
Were the last Outlook versions actually native? Say starting around Office 2016. They always felt very... off. Extremely laggy. Weird scrollbar behavior. I don't usually use windows, but my employer uses Office 365, so I've been using Outlook web for several years now. It felt much snappier and more pleasant to use than the native client. I understand there are some features missing, but since I'm a very basic user (the most advanced thing I use is combining messages into conversations), it never bothered me. The new Outlook UI looks extremely similar to the web one, and the app feels snappier on my machine. The thing I dislike the most is the empty space at the top of the window, but I guess that's just the current fashion.
msh 3y ago
Oh how i loved winforms back in the day. IMHO the best desktop toolkit there ever was.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Not sure about that. On Windows, MFC was the peak IMHO. It was a beast to develop for, but the results were good. Everything .NET was already inferior.
lawgimenez 3y ago
I developed a Windows phone app before using UWP and it was decent during that time. I could deploy on Windows Phone, Windows and Xbox in one codebase. But then Windows phone became obsolete in the blink of an eye.

tmikaeld 3y ago

The native views of thunderbird are wonderfully performant, especially when browsing thousands of e-mails in lists and sorting through them. I'd never be able to go back to scrolling with "skeleton rows" that's the web default because it can't render fast enough..

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
What's funny is that Thunderbird UI is not native. It uses XUL which is Mozilla's version of something like Electron that has existed since before Electron was even conceived as an idea. That it feels like a native application shows just how really shit Electron is.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  I think the interesting part about XUL and why I really enjoyed it back in the day is that it's what HTML-for-applications could have been. It's still a "document" in the way any XML is a "document", but the markup is way more application-focused than document-focused. But instead we keep using a markup language that's designed for documents and try our best to make it usable in a very not-a-document way. Edit: one detail I don't recall is what XUL actually uses for rendering components on-screen.
codethief 3y ago
> The native views of thunderbird are wonderfully performant Are we using the same Thunderbird? For me it feels rather sluggish.
- ksec 3y ago
  99% of HN suggest VSCode is very fast, when Sublime exist. It is one reason why the other day we have a submission "Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened" Most people aren't latency sensitive. Or do not care about it enough. The world of computing has then settle of sluggish behaviour being the norm. As most are OK with it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933
  - FractalHQ 3y ago
    I’m pretty sure the apps do a lot more now than they did on windows XT. I wouldn’t build with Electron over something like Tauri+Svelte but I also don’t mind waiting 1 second for hundreds of great extensions and lsps to load once for a 4 hour session.
    - funcDropShadow 3y ago
      > I’m pretty sure the apps do a lot more now than they did on windows XT The question is whether that additional work is of any benefit to the user.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  Sluggish? It's near instantaneous at everything, except when it's doing network operations. It literally does a keyword stem search on a 4GB mailbox in under a 1/10 of a second. That's the fastest inverted index lookup I've ever seen - all accomplished with just sqlite. I consider it amazing. It makes the old version of Outlook look like a dog. A one legged dog. And the leg is broken. As others have noted, as soon at it has to access the network it slows down. A lot. And it you queue up enough operations, it can get confused - particularly if the network drops out in the middle and it has to re-sync everything. But it is imap, so I forgive it. To get it's native non-networked speed, you do have to ensure every folder is downloaded to local storage. Do that, and it's amazingly quick.
pohuing 3y ago
Provided thunderbird is finished fetching mails. Why that is happening on the ui thread is beyond me, but thunderbird is always frozen for a couple dozens seconds after opening it after a bunch of new mail came in.

rektide 3y ago

Vscode feels blitz fast. Which apps have you tried that feel slow?

klodolph 3y ago
VS Code is reasonably fast but it’s somewhat an exception in the world of slow Electron apps. I’ve seen performance issues with Slack and Discord. Spotify isn’t Electron, it’s CEF, but it has the same problems. The parts of Apple’s Music app which run inside the web view are noticeably worse than the other parts.
- rektide 3y ago
  These two apps seem to be the number one and two most popular desktop-packaged webapps & they have done immeasurable damage to the perception of the web as a technology. It's cemented the perception of web desktop tech in many people's mind & I question whether it's possible to de-infect what has become a quite strongly held dogmatism. There's few apps broadly actually uses these days, so the opportunity is also troublingly slim. I want to ask, what are the contestible assertions, what would change your mind? But even for me it's hard to imagine finding sufficient leverage, having enough examples, to really challenge the negative perceptions. For what it's worth, discord load time is a bit obnoxious but I've found it to be pretty performant once loaded, and I'm a fairly intense user who is on many dozens of servers.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    Framing it as “dogmatism” is unfair. Most people just try to see what the various tradeoffs are between alternatives. For desktop apps, we’re talking about Electron versus, say, Qt, Cocoa, WPF, or whatever. The observation that web packaged apps are typically slower and typically have worse UIs is probably not being contested here. Likewise, the advantages of Electron for cutting costs and shipping apps faster is probably not being contested. I think the only real question people have is, “Do you care?” I used the desktop version of Discord for a few years. It seems like—well, a real piece of shit, to be honest. So I use the web client now. Performance is only really a problem when you scroll around, deep in the history of a channel. My point of reference is apps like Adium.

unregistereddev 3y ago

First, I agree. Microsoft has failed to provide a viable platform for native GUI development, and IMO there is still a place for native desktop applications. Part of the reason Windows stayed so prevalent for so long is its rich software ecosystem - arguably, an ecosystem that partially resulted from MS's focus on developers. However, there may be additional reasons for building new products with web tech. Someone already needs to maintain the web versions of these applications. If you're going to offer web access to Outlook, a team needs to be responsible for maintaining that web application. By replacing the native desktop app with a wrapper around their existing web application, Microsoft reduces the need to separately build and maintain features in both platforms.

JohnFen 3y ago
> By replacing the native desktop app with a wrapper around their existing web application, Microsoft reduces the need to separately build and maintain features in both platforms. True, but it's at the price of having an inferior product. But perhaps Microsoft doesn't care about that.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Microsoft built their whole business on providing inferior copies of other products, they never cared and never will.

SyneRyder 3y ago

Thunderbird is good, but I'll also suggest Postbox for people looking for alternatives. It's a commercial fork of Thunderbird (so about as "native" as Thunderbird is), but I find Postbox has a nicer UI, and at the time I switched its local email search was significantly faster. Layout is customizable, you're not restricted to the design (or theme) in their screenshots: https://www.postbox-inc.com/ It has some support for Thunderbird plugins. I use a self-modified version of h.ogi's Priority Switcher to bring back the user-editable priority column that Eudora used to have. (I don't understand how people can process their mail without sorting it by Priority....) Won't be for everyone - it's not open source, not free and there's no Linux version (yet?). Personally I'm happy to pay for a professional / premium email client experience, since it's so mission-critical to my work.

AJ007 3y ago
If you don't like the original Thunderbird UI, try the new Thunderbird Supernova - https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/ They are updating the UI, and doing a good job https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/thunderbird-115-supernova-preview-the-new-folder-pane/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/thunderbird-115-superno...
V__ 3y ago
I'm also a Postbox user and quite happy so far but I don't know if I would recommend it. Development seems to have stopped and Thunderbird is making good progress on the redesign.

AJ007 3y ago

Outlook's UI design by itself really is terrible. I don't know how so many people accept using it. I have a single business account I used Outlook for, switched to Thunderbird, and it is vastly less painful to use. I can find, read, and sort emails at least 3x quicker than with Outlook. Modern commercial UI/UX design really has drifted far away from "good." Photoshop suffers the same problem - 10 years ago the UI was quick, responsive, and efficient. Now it feels like wading through mud.

JohnFen 3y ago
> I don't know how so many people accept using it. Everyone I know who uses it only does so because their employers require them to.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  I've been using Outlook for .. wow over 25 years now. Early on it was an unstable crashy mess, but in the past 15 years it has been rock solid, reliable, and more than fast enough for anything I've ever done with it. I am ... not happy that the full client is slated to go away at some point in the future. I know Outlook well; I know how to wield it effectively and to make it behave in the way I want it to. I have a Macbook and a Windows desktop PC at work. Outlook on the Mac is a tire fire, and it is the new WebView2 version. Horrendous. For the moment, I can get something like the full Windows Outlook application via Outlook for the Web, which is saying a lot, because it itself is an extremely watered-down version of the full Outlook email client on Windows. Microsoft has been doing this a lot lately, and it's starting to make me a bit angry. They replace good stuff that they don't want to work on anymore with some web-enabled version or a version built on web technologies, which itself is a bad idea, even if the replacements were feature-complete compared to what they're replacing, but they're not. They're partial skeletons in comparison to what they're replacing. Toys. ALL of the advanced features that I have come to rely on in Outlook in the past 25 years are simply not present in Outlook for Mac. It's a bad trend and I don't see it stopping. In another decade, the apps we have now will be replaced with something else once someone at Microsoft once again gets it inside their head that it'll be better to rewrite rather than to adopt the existing code, and that version will be even slimmer and more useless than what's coming out today. We are choosing to make things worse every day and I do not understand it. I'm not saying that Outlook is a shining example of a good application, or that it is even in the top 10 email clients, I'm saying that I'm used to it and that I like it. It has continuously improved for 25 years and now it's slated to be replaced with a fucking webapp that's running locally. What in the world are people smoking thinking that ease of development is paramount to performance for applications which are very interaction-heavy? Typing text into Outlook for Mac on an M1 with 32GB of RAM is not instantaneous. FOR AN EMAIL APPLICATION. Unacceptable, but this is the route they're choosing because development is easier... I will never understand how web tech got so bad, and even if I do wind up understanding that, I will definitely not ever understand why people choose to use web technologies over things which have worked and have continually improved for decades.

AnonC 3y ago

Sadly, Thunderbird is becoming (or has become) a non-option in companies that use Outlook365/Microsoft365. Microsoft seems to have been quite effective in disabling IMAP and SMTP as a default in these tenants and scaring companies that even with OAuth2, these are insecure and not as safe as sticking with Outlook as the client. Companies (actually the information security teams) may be taking shortcuts based on Microsoft’s recommendations to reduce their work while imposing a huge cost on every worker. It used to be that companies were locked in with Windows and MS Office. But there were some alternative options for those. IMO, now companies are heavily locked in to Microsoft by subscribing to Microsoft365. There is no migrating out or exit path for this. They just have to suffer through whatever Microsoft puts them through.

Propelloni 3y ago
Well, there is Owl [1], which I have mentioned before. Of course, it is the old "chase the rabbit" game we know since the 2000s -- MS365 is just a faster moving target than Exchange on MS Windows Server. So far the devs have kept up well, I can count the instances I had to fall back to OWA on one hand over the last year. And I use it daily within my company. [1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en/thunderbird/addon/owl-for-exchange/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en/thunderbird/addon/owl-for-...
- AnonC 3y ago
  Yes, I know there’s Owl as well as some other (non-Thunderbird) options. But at the higher level, the teams defining what protocols to allow or disallow also manage the policies. That’s what I meant by Microsoft (influencing and) locking in companies.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

Well bloody good luck with that mate, I'm desperately looking to switch away from Thunderbird (started using it last year) and while I genuinely hate Microsoft (see many of my past posts), Outlook just plain works. Thunderbird has just been one bug after another.

vladvasiliu 3y ago

Were the last Outlook versions actually native? Say starting around Office 2016. They always felt very... off. Extremely laggy. Weird scrollbar behavior. I don't usually use windows, but my employer uses Office 365, so I've been using Outlook web for several years now. It felt much snappier and more pleasant to use than the native client. I understand there are some features missing, but since I'm a very basic user (the most advanced thing I use is combining messages into conversations), it never bothered me. The new Outlook UI looks extremely similar to the web one, and the app feels snappier on my machine. The thing I dislike the most is the empty space at the top of the window, but I guess that's just the current fashion.

msh 3y ago

Oh how i loved winforms back in the day. IMHO the best desktop toolkit there ever was.

steve1977 3y ago
Not sure about that. On Windows, MFC was the peak IMHO. It was a beast to develop for, but the results were good. Everything .NET was already inferior.

lawgimenez 3y ago

I developed a Windows phone app before using UWP and it was decent during that time. I could deploy on Windows Phone, Windows and Xbox in one codebase. But then Windows phone became obsolete in the blink of an eye.