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Comment by culot | Hacker News Reader

Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles.

Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison.

As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.

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With respect to windows phone, I really miss the tiles, the consistency of the metro style gui and other little details, like automatic do not disturb mode while driving or face recognition well before it became mainstream.

I completely agree and I used to work at Microsoft.

Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps. It's an instructive story of how an inferior product can win. I'm not saying that happens all the time or that it's inevitable, but I think it's safe to say that's sort of what happened here.

> Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps

I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent?

Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView (20/20 hindsight now!).

Their equivalent of WKWebView is some sort of zombie IE11 version (not edge, with different features and flaws than IE11 desktop). Hideous.

Disclosure: we developed a Hybrid app for Windows Phone (based on Xamarin).

Not just the browser, the whole platform was crap to develop for. My company ported a bunch of apps by a major app publisher to various versions of Windows Phone and the documentation was shitty, the APIs were shitty, everything shifted with each new version and everything was buggy. We kept asking our local Microsoft branch for help (backed by the publisher we were porting for) and more often than not they were powerless to help.

A far cry from developers, developers, developers.

Even Microsoft themselves dropped the ball, when it took over a year for them to release Skype - which they owned - for their own mobile platform (if I'm remembering correctly, i had a Windows Phone and rather liked it).

A platform without users or apps and years late is not one I'd call superior. Good ideas are not nearly enough, as they often say around HN.

I thought it was pretty clear from the poster's message he was talking about product sans network effects.

An inferior product can win because this inferior product you talked about had already won by the time this superior product came along. Microsoft just didn't want to admit it.

Dark mode was nice as well. To toggle from light/dark and have alnost every app follow suit was luxurious. On Android it's such a hodgepodge of light and dark, an affront to the eyes at times.

Also being able to select text from most anywhere was useful.

Typing on Windows Phone was a delight, for a touchscreen-based keyboard. They had their typing game on point. Now with an Android device, I find myself switching keyboard software often.

I'm cursed with thumbs that are not compatible with touch screens. Not because of my thumbs themselves, and obviously touch screen keyboards work for most people so it can't be the keyboards. I don't have abnormally fat thumbs, or any physical deformities.. touch screen keyboards just hate me, to the point where it's a running joke among family and friends. Every post I've ever made is a relentless struggle against typos that even the best autocorrect can't seem to help with. I've tried every major keyboard on Android, and have owned iPhones and every other device imaginable.

Windows Phone though? Absolute pleasure to type on. I've never used any device that was easier to type on than my old Lumia 920.

> As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.

It's effectively single-threaded, with all the I/O running on the same thread as the GUI (oh import is so fun). And you need to load the entire metadata database for a folder into memory at once.

I have looked into fixing it before, but it does require redoing pretty much the entire API, which means its several man-years of developer work. And Mozilla has never invested enough in Thunderbird to let that sort of work get done.

>As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.

I leave Thunderbird open in the background and come back to a notification that some component or other crashed. Happens all the time, no clue why. Email is common enough that I'd expect there to be a half-decent client for it, but I don't know of one...

(IRC is also common, at least among people who write code, but I don't know of a free client that isn't worse than running irssi in cygwin.)

Google killed the need for a decent mail client. The entire PIM space on Linux has gone through a major regression since 2012, when I shut down my XMPP/IMAP/SyncML/CalDAV/CardDAV services and started using google. It seems like a lot of folks jumped ship to web based tools about that time.

> I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow

This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.

> This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen.

I see it both fast and slow. Ironically it's absurdly slow on my 8-core desktop and just fine on my older dual core laptop (both with SSDs and same accounts, etc). Definitely weird, but this behaviour has peristed for years, so much that I had to disable TB features on my desktop just so I could type without stalling.

> first thoughts would be to compact your folders and if that doesn't help, vacuum the sqlite files.

Might also recommend a disk check, perhaps FS needs fixing.

At one point I cleared out all TB folders and started from scratch, problem reappeared, so I don't think that's it. Very strange indeed.

The items mentioned above should be done periodically, not just once. Perhaps there are some giant files in there too?

> The items mentioned above should be done periodically, not just once

While helpful advice - if you need to do this manual maintenance regularly, the application is broken.

Possibly, hard to know over this medium. I’ve never encountered the problem, but added the tasks to my cleanup command.

Not to denigrate the hard work of developers (particularly open source developers) who work on very complex application software like Thunderbird, but software designed for regular users needs to cope without cleanup scripts. (Yes, yes, I know that reinstalling Windows from scratch is a time honoured tradition...)

Sure. My cleanup script however does multiple things, tbird maintenance is only a tiny part.

Maybe the old folders used mbox, which stuffs entire folders of emails in a single file, while the current stardard (for a while now) is Maildir, a file per email.

I have ~1 million emails in Thunderbird. The GUI thread often gets blocked waiting while it's trying to open messages. Search is horrifically slow. This is on a fairly decent ThinkPad X1.

One day I'll finally take the plunge and jump to notmuch, which I've been told is the only email client actually capable of handling millions of emails without sucking.

Quiet often it's add-ons that are are at fault, e.g. the Lighnting calendar add-on can significantly extend launch time. Starting TB in safe mode will reveal if this is the case.

perhaps put your hardware and some benchmark numbers so people can compare? if something takes 2 seconds, you might consider that "fast" and others "slow". loads of things i think are slow i realize others don't notice (or care).

Apparently load time is 1.5-2 seconds. I swear it often feels slower than that. shrugs That's not bad.

The rendering corruption/lag issue with scrolling only happens while scrolling a message while in split-pane view, not when the message is maximized in its own tab.

Its search is excellent, but the load time of the program itself, of emails, is very slow for me, on both Windows and Linux. Then the rendering! As I scroll an email it struggles to render the content and lags behind. Same problems on release, beta, and nightly. Hmm.

It happpens under various circumstances, nothing easy to pin-point here.

Example: on two identical iMacs (4 cores, 16GB RAM, PCIe SSD) with about 100GB of local synced IMAP and the same accounts, it's slow for one user's iMac but fast on the other. Deleted TB and profile, fresh user, fresh TB install, fresh config; same result.

> As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.

I don't have either of those problems, using TB for a decade. Not sure what your issue could be but first thoughts would be to compact your folders and if that doesn't help, vacuum the sqlite files.

It turns out my scrolling lag and rendering issues disappear when I disable smooth-scrolling. Simple fix. :)

>As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.

Compared to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook online it's very very fast. Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.

The new Gmail interface is slow. Man, it's just so freaking slow. The fans get whirring, the network calls are probably blocked by the UI and if you delete a message and quickly close the page it never goes through.

Thunderbird struggles with managing and searching large mail archives in a way that Gmail doesn't. I use Thunderbird for a work email account, and its GUI thread regularly gets blocked while trying to search or open messages.

To be fair, my work email account is an exceptional case - it's got somewhere around ~1 million emails.

Gmail, particularly with the new Gmail interface launched a few months ago, also sucks performance wise, but in different ways from Thunderbird.

> Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.

The number of times where I am typing an email and somehow trigger hot keys is absolutely ridiculous. Mid-word and suddenly I've deleted the draft, changed labels, and muted & archived a critical conversation is absolutely infuriating. It's Outlook level bad.

Have Android’s “widgets” been removed? That’s a thing I still miss sometimes on iOS, most of my Nexus One’s homescreen was taken up by my calendar.

That's still a thing, it's just the design of widgets from app to app is disparate, usually visually clashing if multiple widgets are used. Not as clean and uniform as Windows Phone tiles.

There is an Android launcher (launcher 10, i think) that offers tiles, and some of them even live tiles. It's okay, not quite the same slick experience though.

They haven't been removed per se, but fewer apps tend to have them. Most Google apps have high quality widgets.

Widgets are alive and kicking.

I had a Windows Phone, it had a lot of good things about it, but I have no desire for anyone to resurrect it. There was just not enough developer interest/market share to sustain it.

I still miss having my next appointment on my lock screen. The Pixel gets this mostly right with calendar info on the ambient screen display, but still seems a bit shy about showing it.

Speaking of e-mail clients, come to the bright side and use blazing fast tools like `mutt`. Thanks to such tools, my day-to-day "computing experience" has become far more pleasant for the past five years.

>Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles.

So download widgets to show what you want?

I've invested a lot of time trying to find solutions in that manner and have always ended up with hacky results, usually hideous as well. There is no cohesive solution for that Android that I've been able to find.

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