Thunderbird 128: Annual ESR Brings New Features and 'a Rust Revolution' (thunderbird.net) 78
Thunderbird's annual Extended Support Release was revealed Friday, promising "significant" improvements to the overall user experience and "the speed at which we can deliver new features to you," according to the Thunderbird blog:
We've devoted significant development time integrating Rust — a modern programming language originally created by Mozilla Research — into Thunderbird. Even though this is a seemingly invisible change, it is a major leap forward because it enhances our code quality and performance. This overhaul will allow us to share features between the desktop and future mobile versions of Thunderbird, and speed up our development process. It's a win for our developers and a win for you.
More from the blog OMG Ubuntu: I'm also stoked to see that Thunderbird 128 makes 'newest first' the default sort order for messages in message list. While some prefer the old way, I always found it strange that the oldest mails were shown first — team reverse chronology, represent!
They also cite "a number of OpenPGP improvements," plus a new preference option for displaying full names and email addresses of all recipients in the message list. (Plus, threaded-message views now display a "New Message" count.)
Other new features in this release:
More from the blog OMG Ubuntu: I'm also stoked to see that Thunderbird 128 makes 'newest first' the default sort order for messages in message list. While some prefer the old way, I always found it strange that the oldest mails were shown first — team reverse chronology, represent!
They also cite "a number of OpenPGP improvements," plus a new preference option for displaying full names and email addresses of all recipients in the message list. (Plus, threaded-message views now display a "New Message" count.)
Other new features in this release:
- A new and more attractive layout for Cards View (with adjustable heights) that "makes it easier to scan your email threads and glean information."
- The folder pane has better recall of message thread states
- Improved theme compatibility. "Your Thunderbird should blend seamlessly with your desktop environment, matching the system's accent colors perfectly." (Especially beneficial on Ubuntu and Mint.)
- You can now customize the color of your account icon.
The Thunderbird blog also mentions that "We plan to launch the first phase of built-in support for Exchange, as well as Mozilla Sync, in a future Nebula point release (e.g. Thunderbird 128.X)."
Is Rust political? (Score:2)
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Has anyone polled them?
Why are you demanding extraordinary amounts of proof to refute your speculation. That's shifting the burden. You still seem to be asserting that the devs are being forced to use Rust when there is no evidence of that. As an open source project, the team blogs about the process. The most recent blog [thunderbird.net] from dev leader announcing version 128 highlights their use of Rust.
Between possibly losing talent over sweeping changes and them being volunteer, shouldn't their opinion should count?
First of all, please provide evidence that the team lost talent due to Rust because they did not want to use Rust. You have asserted something m
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Do devs want this or is this being forced upon the community?
You do realize that Rust comes from Mozilla in the first place, right? They invented then pushed it due to the difficulties of programming a browser in C++. Mozilla pushed Rust on the world, not the other way around.
Re: Is Rust political? (Score:2)
Rust was built because the guidelines set by the then-CTO prevented using C++ correctly and led to most of the team misunderstanding C++ and looking for an alternative, which is essentially just codifying their bad C++ patterns as a language.
Many of the people from then are not involved anymore and Thinderbird is free to evolve independently as it sees fit now, so there is nothing preventing it from using proper C++.
Re: Is Rust political? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rust was built because the guidelines set by the then-CTO prevented using C++ correctly
Bull fucking SHIT. Thunderbird and Firefox both suffer massively from the legacy of Netscape's giant push to jump on the distributed object model that was on fire at the time with COM and CORBA [wired.com].
so there is nothing preventing it from using proper C++
As someone who does a lot of C++, define proper. STL? Boost? C++11, C++17, shoot why not C++23, constexpr, template metaprogramming... I'm all ears to hear someone say what the official blessed way to do things are. Smart pointers all the way? Default deletors or custom? Refactor code to have move semantics or leave the copy in place and go for more granular memory allocation? Should we toss in some concepts too? You know that's new hotness right now.
Every single thing you have said about this project is an absolute you pulled it out your goddamn ass. You should instead listen to people who have actually worked on the various old Netscape and rebrand Mozilla projects. [github.io]
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rust is not political, it's just a tool.
human organizations (like eg mozilla) are all political indeed to some extent, and lately rust appears to be a common element to push to advance political standings in them, because of all the hype which acts like a closed feedback loop. if that's a good contribution or a bad one any particular project only time will tell, but as of today even fewer people care about thunderbird than about rust so ...
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Rust is a platform, and platforms are always political... and full of religious fanatics.
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Exactly, and the best platforms always attract peanut galleries full of fanatic haters such as yourself.
Vaal provides... (Score:2)
And so does Rust. We have no other way. What is this...kiss?
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Do devs want this or is this being forced upon the community?
Thunderbird depends heavily, and I mean HEAVILY, on FireFox (ESR), and Firefox has a ton of rust code as it is, and will incorporate more in the future.
So, from a technical point of view, using rust in other places inside thunderbird is a sensible decition.
It also helps that rust is a popular language which looks nice in a developer's CV, and that it is perceived as "equaly as performant but safer than C/C++"
TL;DR: No, is not political, is technically convenient.
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In fact, Thunderbird used to be an integral part of Mozilla. Splitting it out was a fantastic project management decision. But trying to kick it out of Mozilla foundation entirely was a horrible, misguided idea. Thankfully, the end user uproar put a stop to that.
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Devs want it. It has nothing to do with politics. Devs like Rust because it's a great tool with amazing infrastructure and it's intellectually stimulating to learn. This is called "staying current".
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Encryption is great and all, but there's no business case for its widespread use. There's far more money to be made by spying and advertising, and nobody makes privacy easy.
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Until PGP support gets made standard in Gmail and Outlook (web and desktop) it will probably never take off. And it needs someone to make it much, much easier to use, because even trying to explain the concepts to people confuses them.
New "feature": Privacy-Preserving Attribution (Score:2)
I turned off Privacy-Preserving Attribution [mozilla.org] as soon as I found out about it.
Mozilla is prototyping this feature in order to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.
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Oops - confused Thunderbird 128 with Firefox 128
I do not want "revolutions" in a tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Any good tool does incremental, gradual improvements. Tools claiming "revolutions" should not be used for anything of importance.
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Any good tool does incremental, gradual improvements. Tools claiming "revolutions" should not be used for anything of importance.
That seems like an absolutism that limits progress. Both the Hubble and James Webb telescopes promised and brought revolutions to astronomy. They should not be used for any important science according to you.
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Not really. They were gradual improvements. The "revolution" part is just dishonest and inane marketing. My guess would be the same is true for this "revolution" in TB as well and I was calling that out. Maybe a not obviously enough.
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Not really. They were gradual improvements.
Astronomers and physicists would probably disagree that Hubble was a "gradual improvement."
. The "revolution" part is just dishonest and inane marketing. My guess would be the same is true for this "revolution" in TB as well and I was calling that out. Maybe a not obviously enough.
Considering version 128 was released two days, how would you know? If you have a time machine where you have been to the future where this was not a revolution, please get me the next winning lottery tickets.
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Not really. They were gradual improvements.
Astronomers and physicists would probably disagree that Hubble was a "gradual improvement."
Engineers would not.
. The "revolution" part is just dishonest and inane marketing. My guess would be the same is true for this "revolution" in TB as well and I was calling that out. Maybe a not obviously enough.
Considering version 128 was released two days, how would you know? If you have a time machine where you have been to the future where this was not a revolution, please get me the next winning lottery tickets.
Do you know what a "guess" is?
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Do you know what a "guess" is?
Yes, basically talking out of your ass. The software is Free and open source, you can easily try it instead of spreading bullshit.
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Do you know what a "guess" is?
Yes, basically talking out of your ass. The software is Free and open source, you can easily try it instead of spreading bullshit.
Well, that may be true for you....
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Engineers would not.
From an engineer's perspective, which telescopes are just slightly less capable than Hubble and JWST. I mean there must have been lots of previous space telescopes that had the instrumentation, sensitivity, and capability as Hubble. Also for JWST, all the telescopes before that one had to have their instruments cooled to 7K and use a massive solar shield.
Do you know what a "guess" is?
So your guess is not based on your experience then.
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Rust allow them to implement *native* Exchange support. Is this for you a "revolution" or incremental progress? For me, Supernova (Thunderbird 115) a year ago was "revolution", since then is incremental progress.
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That is a step backwards...
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Seamonkey is still around and it looks like Netscape 4.0 https://www.seamonkey-project.... [seamonkey-project.org]
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Seamonkey is weird because it contains both the ancient developer tools, and the modern developer tools at the same time.
You access the modern developer tools with F12, and it looks just like modern Firefox.
But if you look in the menu, there's the ancient "Web Console" and "DOM Inspector" tools in there, and *no menu command* that opens the modern developer tools. You just have to already know it's F12 to access it.
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The "revolutions" claim is just a hyperbole, using Thunderbird beta as my daily driver I can vouch there was there was no earth shattering change in the last year, only incremental improvements. Which is fine, as currently Thunderbird is really good.
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Tools claiming "revolutions" should not be used for anything of importance.
So you're still using DOS then? Or V1.0 of the Linux kernel? Your comment is silly. It ignores the fact that all software in history has major, minor, or point releases. Major releases were usually "revolutions" and for some software it includes breaking changes.
The importance of software is based on one thing and one thing only: How are changes managed, tested, and documented. Nothing more, nothing less. Revolutions happen in all major software including important ones.
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As usual, you completely miss the point.
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As usual, you completely miss the point.
No, as usual you failed to make it. Those people who say "I communicated, you just didn't understand" fail to see the point of communication. If you'd like to clarify your point, now's the chance.
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Communication can have a lot of purposes. For "thegarbz" it is quite often just to disagree without adding anything of value. In the case at hand, he used a tired, old, irrelevant pseudo-argument.
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Well, then, although from experience you are not equipped to understand this: Why would I be stuck at Linux 1.0? Gradual improvements brought us to today. There was no revolution along the way.
Or maybe your problem is this here:
revolution, n: a sudden, radical, or complete change
Is it still a slow and unusable? (Score:2)
Thunderbird 115 has been absolutely horrendous. Ever since their UI re-design it has been slow as a dog and completely unusable while doing more than one thing at a time (things as complex as fetching messages). There were complaints all over about it and somehow with over 10+ minor releases to say nothing of point releases it was never addressed.
I'll wait for someone else to test 128. Version 102.15.1 is perfectly functional (despite being a shitshow to setup in some circumstances) though it's just not tak
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What I take away from this is that Thunderbird is going to get even slower.
Re:Is it still a slow and unusable? (Score:5, Informative)
> There seems to be no option to completely disable update checking.
Maybe there is; one of the methods listed here may (still) work:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1314978 [mozilla.org]
I'm still blissfully running TB 102.15.1 (64-bit) with no upgrade nagging. "About Thunderbird" says "Updates disabled by your system administrator".
I just checked my TB distribution directory (Windows) and found a distribution directory with a policies.json file containing "DisableAppUpdate": true
Like you, I found the UI redesign terrible and am happy to wait for someone else to test version 128.
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Like you, I found the UI redesign terrible
To be clear I can't comment on the UI redesign. I haven't been able to use it due to the performance issue. If you use thunderbird with an IMAP server that has more than a couple of thousand emails the UI spends most of its time locked up / lagging out since it is unresponsive when communicating to a server. Not an issue if you pull a few messages from POP, but utterly crippling if every task you do needs to be synced to a server.
I don't know how bad the UI design is, it's the underlying engine driving it t
Re: Is it still a slow and unusable? (Score:2)
Thunderbird has been slow and unusable since version 3.
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Thunderbird has been slow and unusable since version 3.
My problem is literally solved by downgrading to 102. So you and I have different performance related problems.
Slow and the interface is awful now (Score:2)
Not only is it slow, but it's now a real eye sore on my Mate Desktop. So much so that I rolled back to Thunderbird 102 and have no plans to ever upgrade it. From the screenshots it looks like they've now even removed the threaded tree-view way of organizing messages. I do not want my e-mail client to look like MS Outlook or Gmail. Thunderbird 102 hits a sweet spot for me in terms of look and feel and usability. It looks like the traditional e-mail client has always done, and that is what I want. I'm
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From the screenshots it looks like they've now even removed the threaded tree-view way of organizing messages. I do not want my e-mail client to look like MS Outlook or Gmail.
They didn't remove it. There is an option and you can choose "Table View" (classic mode) or "Cards View" (modern view). Of course the screenshots in a press release will highlight the new mode.
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Thunderbird 115 has been absolutely horrendous.
That doesn't match my experience. Using it for about one year and I won't switch back.
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Congrats I guess. You're not in the situation to trigger the problem. Just be careful, you're on the edge of posting a comment gaslighting everyone talking about a pretty damn wide spread and well known performance problem caused by syncing.
Oldest first for me (Score:2)
I have Apple mail display oldest first (i.e., at the top).
But, then, I only have 6 messages in my inbox as I am a zero guy.
Slackware has ESR editions (Score:2)
A revolution.. great. (Score:2)
Re: A revolution.. great. (Score:2)
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You're not going to convince anyone at Mozilla about this. They have a long history of completely re-writing things. In some cases (e.g. Quantum) it has had an incredible positive effect. In some it's quite the opposite. Thunderbird 115 basically completely re-wrote the UI code (and it sucked - not from the UI point of view, but from the performance).
Re: A revolution.. great. (Score:1)
Removing the check for new messages button was just asinine. One of the devs claimed that button was out of date and everyone dies texts now. The clown needs to be kept the heâ(TM)ll away from email client development.
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Honestly I can't complain about the UI itself, because on my machine Thunderbird is unusable. If you use IMAP to access an inbox that has more than a couple of thousand emails then v115 post UI redesign is just cripplingly slow as the UI locks when communicating with the server. Not so much of an issue if you pull 1 message from a POP server, quite a problem if everything you do sends an update to a server.
v102 was the last version that I could physically use, so it's the last I can really critique the UI d
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Rewriting your app in a "super safe" language is a guaranteed way to introduce a large numbers of bugs.
Yes yes we know about the bugs, but more importantly can we make it run slower too?
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Rewriting your app in a "super safe" language is a guaranteed way to introduce a large numbers of bugs.
Except they don't rewrite the app. So far only a few modules are written in Rust, one important example being the Exchange support.
Wheres the link (Score:2)
How about a link to download it?
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Get to the link provided, the Thunderbird blog, it has a huge download button, you can't miss it.
Ugh. (Score:3)
I recently upgraded to v115. What crap. Totally terrible UI. Had to downgrade back to v52 to get a reasonable UI. These UX "engineers" don't understand the first thing about perceptual psychology, the most important of which for UI is that you can find something by color vastly faster than by shape.
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They changed more than the colour. They changed the underlying engine too so now the UI locks when doing server activities. For anyone using IMAP Thunderbird v115 was utterly unusable performance wise. I can't even comment on the UI looks because I never got that far. v102 for the win (which had it's own really frigging stupid UI choices, especially in the server configuration).
Article title misleading (Score:3)
While thunderbird is based on firefox ESR, thunderbird itself is just thunderbird.
You see, in firefirefox you have release (approx every 4~5 weeks) and ESR (approx every year).
But thunderbird has one and only one version per year*. there are no "release" versions every 4~5 weeks. So, this release is the newest release, BASED on Firefox ESR, but not an ESR ritself.
* Every 4~5 weeks there are patches for thunderbird, but it remains the same version (128 in this case) for the full year
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Not to split hairs, but TBird's "About" box (on Windows) reads,
That's a lot of ESR for something that doesn't have an ESR release.
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Not to split hairs, but TBird's "About" box (on Windows) reads,
That's a lot of ESR for something that doesn't have an ESR release.
That's heritage from firefox. try to find a thunderbird "ESR" version in the downloads page.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en... [thunderbird.net]
Nope. you will only find "Thunderbird", "Thunderbird Beta" & "Thunderbird Nightly"
Or, go to the release notes:
https://www.thunderbird.net/en... [thunderbird.net]
where are Thunderbird 103 to 114? Or Thunderbrid 116 to 127?
I just wish they would bring back the check email (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s asinine not to have one in a damn email program.
Happy with it (Score:2)
I used to use email *a lot* and managed it with Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey) and later Thunderbird. Then after a career change, for a good while my email usage got very light and webmail was enough. Then about a year ago another career change made email important again... Work place proved Outlook which I couldn't stand it (including some technical issues), so I switched back to Thunderbird. That happened around Supernova release (Thunderbird 115) which was for me a very pleasant surprise, I like it a lot and
Rust Revolution (Score:2)
Rust [wikipedia.org] originated within Mozilla Foundation around 2006, by 2009 it was being sponsored by Mozilla to be used in a new project named "Servo [wikipedia.org]" which started in between 2010 and 2012.
Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020.
After 8 years working in the next generation of a web browser engine (Servo), built around the Rust language, the engine is not yet finished and their developers fired.
More over, in 2017 Mozilla knew Servo was going too slow and they launched the "Quantum [wikipedia.org]" project to incorporate code fr
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C++ has picked up the odd bit of syntactic sugar from Rust, but none of the underlying DNA that makes Rust more consistent and safe than c++. Maybe one day...