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> Our fastest ... ever Last time I installed Thunderbird seems to have been in the 00's sometime[0]. Since then I have used the same install, only updating it

> Our fastest ... ever Last time I installed Thunderbird seems to have been in the 00's sometime[0]. Since then I have used the same install, only updating it, and moving/cloning to other units. Back then PCs were s-l-o-w but Thunderbird was _fast_. Moreso than Outlook/Outlook Express in startup as well as operation. Then, speed deteriorated bit by bit over the years. Due to feature creep, I suppose (in other news; also UX in several subtle ways that all add up). I do not believe that the claim of "Fastest ... ever" is credible, and I have reason to believe that speed on an 13yo X86 unit still running 32bit[1] will not be impressive. Still, if speed is improved even slightly I'd welcome that. [0] Datestamp of earliest email in a random folder is December of 1999 - 23 years ago. But then the earliest emails were imported from another email client into Thunderbird. In any case I started using Thunderbird as a very early adopter, mostly due to their very convincing Firebird product (I was in Tech then, too). [1] The unit I prefer using for anything that does not require Windows or other ressource hogs (eg. browsing like now). Yes it's _that_ old. It's Linux, so no problem.

orbital-decay 3y ago
>Last time I installed Thunderbird was in December of 1999 - 23 years ago Surely that can't be right unless you had a time machine, as it was released in 2004, being based on Phoenix/Firefox.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  I've always thought of a time machine as being capable of traversing time but not rearranging it.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  It existed before that and was called Minotaur, which was a work to separate the mail client from the Mozilla suite. Thunderbird wasn't written from scratch from Phoenix or firebird. But it benefited of all the improvements made to common code used by Phoenix if memory serves right.
- grey_earthling 3y ago
  The pre-1.0 releases were functional (they were derived from the Mozilla App Suite) and relatively popular. I used Thunderbird 0.2, which Wikipedia says would have been in 2003.
rendaw 3y ago
I assumed they mean fast as in, "shortest delay since the previous major release".
- petre 3y ago
  It's fast when it doesn't crash on a big local mailbox. Otherwise it's fast to crash and presents you repeatedly with the choices to wait or kill the app.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way? A few years ago I got my parents new computers. Sadly they are Windows machines, since that's what they're used to. After finding Microsoft's E-mail client to be monumentally defective trash, I installed Thunderbird for them. What a pleasant surprise. It worked well, looked good, and it downloaded all 15,000+ messages from each of their AOL accounts. Yep, AOL.
- yepguy 3y ago
  > I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way? I don't think it has been, but I'm hopeful that the upcoming Thunderbird Sync feature will support syncing filters. I know they are only focused on syncing email account credentials right now, but that's honestly the last thing I care about syncing. More important are all the other little settings, such as filters, that are a huge pain to remember to manually change on all my computers.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Thanks for the reply. It's aggravating that this remains unaddressed. I don't even care about "syncing." All we need is to be able to export them to a file and then import them to another installation. It may not be popular to say this about free software, but WTF? That is simply stupid.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      And the apologist brigade downvotes uncomfortable facts yet again.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        Your lack of desire for syncing is neither uncomfortable nor a fact.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
Funny, all this time ago and I remember the naming controversy with Firebird the database (which I've also used, we were using Interbase, we were a Delphi shop back then).
NovaDudely 3y ago
Seeing as this looks like the finally moved over the Firefox Quantum codebase, it will possibly be faster provided you have the memory to support it. Like FF Quantum, it was definitely faster than the previous version but the memory usage jumped big time as they went down the Chromium route of speed optimization. I sense we may end up with a fork of this just like Firefox did with Pale Moon.
- tmstieff 3y ago
  Firefox also started moving away from a shared memory model towards sandboxed tabs during that period, which had an effect on memory consumption.
grammers 3y ago
I LOVE Thunderbird - never even left. I also use Tutanota, which has its own desktop client; very nice for folks who don't want to take care of the encryption themselves.
- scns 3y ago
  Thank you for the tip! Tutanota looks great!
tlamponi 3y ago
Yeah, I'm still disappointed that they swapped out lots of their C++ implementation with JavaScript. While I definitively think that the devs were qualified to determine that their C++ code base was a too big maintenance burden, I just would have hoped that they went for Rust as replacement, after all Thunderbird shares code with Firefox and came from Mozilla, i.e. the company that gave rust the resources it needed to evolve and become stable to be a C++ replacement... While JS engines are an engineering marvel, they just cannot compete with bare metal compiled code, and the JS single-thread model really doesn't help. I suspect that this is one of the reasons that the input field used for composing a plain text message hangs up every 20s - one minute as the backend has to do some IO or the like, even if the input field could be completely independent (e.g., I never see this behavior in Firefox, with much more tabs open and stuff happening in the background). It might have also other reasons, and it might also be solvable with their JS stack, but what I know for sure is that the effects are real, and I face several frustrating moments a day when my email editor just freezes for ~10s and that this behavior was not existing a few years ago. I even upgraded to a quite powerful workstation (a TLC NVMe over PCIe 4.0, 128 GiB of DDR5 memory, i7-12700K CPU), so yeah not signing off on the "fastest ever" either, that's rather a slap in the face of all power users.
- Ono-Sendai 3y ago
  Yeah I get this pause while writing emails too. Very annoying. Maybe it's a garbage collection pause?
  - mcny 3y ago
    I thought it was just me because my profile folder is now ~100GB. Are you able to reproduce this even with a new installation and new email account with no emails?
    - j16sdiz 3y ago
      I thought it was the mbox storage format. Adding a label or mark something as read need rewriting the file.
    - 3y ago

orbital-decay 3y ago

>Last time I installed Thunderbird was in December of 1999 - 23 years ago Surely that can't be right unless you had a time machine, as it was released in 2004, being based on Phoenix/Firefox.

111111IIIIIII 3y ago
I've always thought of a time machine as being capable of traversing time but not rearranging it.
johnchristopher 3y ago
It existed before that and was called Minotaur, which was a work to separate the mail client from the Mozilla suite. Thunderbird wasn't written from scratch from Phoenix or firebird. But it benefited of all the improvements made to common code used by Phoenix if memory serves right.
grey_earthling 3y ago
The pre-1.0 releases were functional (they were derived from the Mozilla App Suite) and relatively popular. I used Thunderbird 0.2, which Wikipedia says would have been in 2003.

rendaw 3y ago

I assumed they mean fast as in, "shortest delay since the previous major release".

petre 3y ago
It's fast when it doesn't crash on a big local mailbox. Otherwise it's fast to crash and presents you repeatedly with the choices to wait or kill the app.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way? A few years ago I got my parents new computers. Sadly they are Windows machines, since that's what they're used to. After finding Microsoft's E-mail client to be monumentally defective trash, I installed Thunderbird for them. What a pleasant surprise. It worked well, looked good, and it downloaded all 15,000+ messages from each of their AOL accounts. Yep, AOL.

yepguy 3y ago
> I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way? I don't think it has been, but I'm hopeful that the upcoming Thunderbird Sync feature will support syncing filters. I know they are only focused on syncing email account credentials right now, but that's honestly the last thing I care about syncing. More important are all the other little settings, such as filters, that are a huge pain to remember to manually change on all my computers.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Thanks for the reply. It's aggravating that this remains unaddressed. I don't even care about "syncing." All we need is to be able to export them to a file and then import them to another installation. It may not be popular to say this about free software, but WTF? That is simply stupid.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    And the apologist brigade downvotes uncomfortable facts yet again.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Your lack of desire for syncing is neither uncomfortable nor a fact.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

Funny, all this time ago and I remember the naming controversy with Firebird the database (which I've also used, we were using Interbase, we were a Delphi shop back then).

NovaDudely 3y ago

Seeing as this looks like the finally moved over the Firefox Quantum codebase, it will possibly be faster provided you have the memory to support it. Like FF Quantum, it was definitely faster than the previous version but the memory usage jumped big time as they went down the Chromium route of speed optimization. I sense we may end up with a fork of this just like Firefox did with Pale Moon.

tmstieff 3y ago
Firefox also started moving away from a shared memory model towards sandboxed tabs during that period, which had an effect on memory consumption.

grammers 3y ago

I LOVE Thunderbird - never even left. I also use Tutanota, which has its own desktop client; very nice for folks who don't want to take care of the encryption themselves.

scns 3y ago
Thank you for the tip! Tutanota looks great!

tlamponi 3y ago

Yeah, I'm still disappointed that they swapped out lots of their C++ implementation with JavaScript. While I definitively think that the devs were qualified to determine that their C++ code base was a too big maintenance burden, I just would have hoped that they went for Rust as replacement, after all Thunderbird shares code with Firefox and came from Mozilla, i.e. the company that gave rust the resources it needed to evolve and become stable to be a C++ replacement... While JS engines are an engineering marvel, they just cannot compete with bare metal compiled code, and the JS single-thread model really doesn't help. I suspect that this is one of the reasons that the input field used for composing a plain text message hangs up every 20s - one minute as the backend has to do some IO or the like, even if the input field could be completely independent (e.g., I never see this behavior in Firefox, with much more tabs open and stuff happening in the background). It might have also other reasons, and it might also be solvable with their JS stack, but what I know for sure is that the effects are real, and I face several frustrating moments a day when my email editor just freezes for ~10s and that this behavior was not existing a few years ago. I even upgraded to a quite powerful workstation (a TLC NVMe over PCIe 4.0, 128 GiB of DDR5 memory, i7-12700K CPU), so yeah not signing off on the "fastest ever" either, that's rather a slap in the face of all power users.

Ono-Sendai 3y ago
Yeah I get this pause while writing emails too. Very annoying. Maybe it's a garbage collection pause?
- mcny 3y ago
  I thought it was just me because my profile folder is now ~100GB. Are you able to reproduce this even with a new installation and new email account with no emails?
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    I thought it was the mbox storage format. Adding a label or mark something as read need rewriting the file.
  - 3y ago