Mozilla Thunderbird Gets Firefox-style Tabs

daria42 writes "A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers." From the article: "It is unlikely the feature will be found in Mozilla's imminent release of Thunderbird 1.5 -- currently in testing -- but software developer Myk Melez has put test versions of Thunderbird online with the tabbed browsing feature included. However, there are doubts over the suitability of these downloads for production use as they are based on bleeding-edge 'unofficial' code. "

Cached version of page

[Anonymous Coward]

Link [cob-web.org]

Looks out of place

[LiquidCoooled]

From the article it looks like they have replaced the preview pane with tabbed email views.

That looks like it would be confusing - especially if the list above doesn't tally with which email is visible.

I cannot quite see how this would help (tabbed browsing is easy to see the benefits), tabs for the sake of tabs seems pointless.

Lotus Notes

[tscheez]

Notes has had tabs for a very long time. It's nice to see that other people think that is a usefull feature.

Following threads is easier

[Shivetya]

We have Lotus Notes at work. It is not uncommon for me to have more than two messages open at once, each under its own tab. Even my reply is under its own tab. Another example of a good use, I am reading an involved message and an urgent one comes to my attention. Open the new one in its tab and leaving the other's display undisturbed.

Bringing OSS applications up to the level of current business applications is key to gaining acceptance. As with any other feature it should be selectable. Now there are many OSS packages that have features I would love to see in the commercial applications I use by feature movement is much easier one way than the other.

Re:Tabs... for email... hmmm

[technothrasher]

The only thing I would like to se (and it is prolly there, but I just haven't looked for it) is heirarchical email display.

Yup, already there. "View | Sort By | Threaded"

GMail is the future!

[Chalex]

I like Thunderbird. But ever since those guys from Google made GMail, I can't imagine being tied to a desktop mail client.

I believe a web-based interface accessible from anywhere is the inevitable winner in e-mail clients. Just like Linux will inevitably be on all computers, eventually.

Yeeees!

[jimwelch]

One of the big items I miss at home. While the Lotus system sucks big time at work, (poor IT management) this is one of the few items that I love about Lotus.

After using linux for over ten years, Mozilla is the best thing that happened to FOSS.

Clients

[Threni]

I use Gmail. Is there any reason I should go to the effort of configuring Thunderbird to pop3 into my Gmail account when the webmail interface is good enough? I used to use Thunderbird to post to Usenet, but Google is better for that too - it's easier to see replies to your posts using Google than Thunderbird (where there's apparantly no way of doing this except for clicking on your `sent` folder, then looking at the subject line and Usenet group, then locating those, looking for your post.... then back to your sent folder to start the whole process again for your second post etc etc. Google will send you an email when a string occurs in a post to Usenet, and the email contains a link to the post - couldn't be simpler).

Also, it's tedious to configure Thunderbird to talk to an ISP - you have to fuck about with port numbers and user names etc and I frequently forget whether username (for instance) includes or excludes the part of my email address left of the @.

Re:Cannot Find Server / DNS Error while using IE

[Short Circuit]

Browser identification only happens once an HTTP connection has been made. If you're not connecting to the server, it's not because of which browser you're using.

More likely, it's slashdotted and configured to reject connections when under too high a load. :)

Re:Tabs... for email... hmmm

[Burpmaster]

The only thing I would like to se (and it is prolly there, but I just haven't looked for it) is heirarchical email display.

Yup, already there. "View | Sort By | Threaded"

And set the inbox as your "sent mail" folder.

Re:Why?

[wx327]

Even in GMail, with its excellent thread support, I sometimes find I want more than one email easily accessible. Usually, it's when I'm composing a message containing a composite of information from a number of past emails. Happens most when I'm coordinating between different people.

When you are composing an E-mail/reply, there is an icon on the far right (two overlapping squares, one with an arrow) of the send/save now/discard buttons. Clicking the icon will launch your composition window into a new window, without all the usual browser menus and such, so you can use the original browser window to go back and refer to other E-mails.

Re:Extension

[mykmelez]

Unfortunately, I had to touch too much of the core Thunderbird code that it would be quite hard to make the patch into an extension.

You've gotta have priorities...

[JimXugle]

Have they fixed that damn memory leak yet?

right now, I'm lookin' at 132,124KB RAM usage and 151,520KB Virtual Memory Usage JUST FROM THUNDERBIRD

My system isn't all that bad...
P4 2.4GHz
1024MB Shared RAM (32MB to video)
WinXP Home SP2 (yes... I do dual boot into Linux [Kubuntu to be specific])
Thunderbird 1.07