Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

LeoPanthera

Many of these UI changes seem like backward steps.

https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-compariso...

Old: Clear that you can enter multiple "To" addresses. Obvious that the formatting buttons are buttons.

New: Single-line "to" implies you can only enter one address. "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons.

https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png

Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say the new one is any clearer. Maybe even less clear, since the grey textual tips next to the fields have gone.

View on HN

The old To/Cc design was really bad. If you have more than three addresses, then these three lines scroll. The only indication that there are more than three addresses is a tiny scrollbar all the way to the right. I recently sent an e-mail to more people than intended when editing an old message as new, because it had more To-addresses that weren't visible and I didn't notice the scrollbar.

I'm very happy that it's being updated.

Now it needs some visual indication of a complete e-mail address in the To: line. Like a rounded rectangle 1px border around a complete e-mail address and some kind of hint, that you can enter more than one address.

There is a visual indication of a complete email addresses: each correct/complete email address is wrapped in a "pill", a light gray one (see OP screenshot). An incomplete email will similarly get wrapped into a dark red pill.

Your comment maybe indicates the gray is too subtle, or invisible to users with bad eyesight.

You are correct! Somehow I did not see that detail. Good that they thought of this.

The worst bit is that you can't even expand that part of the window to see more addresses at once! Need to include the whole team on this mail? Prepare to squint...

Seems like we won't need MRC Compose anymore?

Agreed about the flat buttons sadly following the OS-cohesiveness-hindering flatness fad instead of adhering to standard OS styling which can be recognized across apps by users.

Disagreed about the To/Cc redesign, the new design is much more efficient when you have multiple recipients, making good use of horizontal space. The old design did lead to:

1. Tons of wasted horizontal space (as each line is a recipient, on each line you only use the few characters describing each recipient, leaving space on the right blank). And also, one-line-per-recipient leads to tedious vertical scrolling inside a vertically-constrained space (3 lines by default, and you don't want more, you want to preserve vertical space for the email body, not the header).

2. Impossibility to easily copy/paste all recipients. With the new design, it's now easy: select all, copy (and repeat once if you have a Cc field, okay).

There's a reason this To/Cc design is what most (all?) desktop/mobile clients do.

At least in the Mail.app on macOS, clear buttons are still used in the toolbar and the window bar when you compose a new message. I definitely think theres new thunderbird buttons are both a downgrade in terms of usability, but also because, aesthetically, I think they look way worse. The icon design is really quite bad. The "A" char is poorly rendered, the stroke width and proportions seem to be all over the place, and the italics "A" looks particularly bad.

Not a fan of the flat buttons but I strongly disagree about the single/multi line TO situation.

I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.

All of them will be comfortable with multiple users in a single To line, while having multiple lines for multiple users will actually appear alien to them.

Perpetuating bad UX choices (or at least trade offs made under the mobile constraint) from mobile into the desktop doesn't help anyone.

I use thunderbird because I want an email client, not a dumbed down web experience built for mobile.

Who said it's a difference made under mobile constraints?

I've literally never used a mail client that didn't do multiple emails on the same line. On Desktop or Mobile.

And it's never been an issue.

I've had issues editing email addresses in clients with multiple mails per line.

As long as everybody is on your address book it's fine, but if they're not, things tend to get awry.

I haven't tried the new Thunderbird, but I am suspicious of this change as well.

"I've had issues editing email addresses in clients with multiple mails per line."

This was my first reaction when I saw the change - I really hope they get this right as it goes to the core functionality of Thunderbird. If email addresses can't be easily and accurately edited in the To field, it will be a real problem for me.

How is it any more difficult to edit multiple email addresses in a single box as it is to edit a multi word subject line in a single box?

Clients tend to get confused about where one address ends and the next one starts. I'm sure there are ways to solve this well, but my personal experience makes me skeptical.

Commas?

Yes, if that's how it's implemented... Gmail doesn't. They wrap your email address text in a button thing. Others prefer semicolons, or was it commas, or was it both?

Its just yet another thing I shouldn't have to think about

There'll always be someone who has trouble with a solution you can come up with...

I've used every major email platform and every single one manages to endure despite having emails on one line. Even Outlook does one line these days.

I wholeheartedly disagree. The new "To" field is much, much easier to use, and I'd be curious why you think it's the result of 'trade offs made under the mobile constraint'.

It's not a mobile constraint. Nearly every desktop mail client also uses a single To line.

I mentioned mobile because as far as discoverability is concerned, there is an order of magnitude more mobile users than desktop users, so the vast majority of users will have no problem understanding this concept.

And if you've been a desktop user long enough that you havent used a smartphone then you're probably used enough software that have similar patterns (and used email enoguh) that you shouldnt have trouble realizing that single To line means you can add multiple recipients to the same line.

Agreed the multi line To field was a frustrating user experience. From my office we were reliant on the addon MRC Compose as no-one would use it over outlook otherwise

> I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.

You'd be wrong. I, grudgingly, moved from mutt to Thunderbird after it was clear that email was turning into MIME-encoded web pages.

So you have used another email app before moving to Thunderbird then...

If you've been using Mutt, the concept of multiple recipients itself is a much harder process of discovery :)

Ironically, I am moving from Thunderbird to Mutt (NeoMutt actually). I find the elimination of HTML means it's actually easier for me to not get distracted by stuff I dont care about for email, which is interaction with real human beings, who are unlikely to be typing complicated HTML messages. Besides, with the right config (I'm still working on it), the HTML message is 1 shortcut away.

Unfortunately, my colleagues, who mostly use Outlook, employ HTML to its full extent when pasting in content to messages. ("Refer to the text highlighted in red.", "See the table for details", etc.)

Back in my BBS days, there was ANSI color with IBM-extended (CP437) block graphics to liven things up, so I can see it has gone full circle a bit.

> Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.

This almost equals to assuming that nobody is older than 25 or 30 especially because the no "single person" assumption. I started with UNIX's mail in a terminal, used a dozen of different clients on UNIX, Windows, Linux, Android, not all of them graphical.

I've been using Thunderbird probably since its very first day. My other client is K9 on Android. I think the address pills will be OK but I want to test their manipulation with keyboard and touchpad.

Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason.

The old window was twice as big as it needs to be too, but I agree the new one is even worse.

I don't like the flat buttons either. I don't use macOS much, but the old ones with a subtle border look like they're native UI, whereas the new flat ones don't. A random image I found confirms that the old buttons and checkbox look the same as what the OS itself uses, while the new ones look very out-of-place:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ACES.png

The point of the huge window is that you have multiple steps and the window is sized for the largest one so it doesn't resize between steps. I'm also unhappy about the extra space but the window being larger than its contents makes sense here.

> "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons

Glad at least they've kept the (albeit small) separators between the buttons.

I immensely dislike the UI trend where everything is flat so there's no discernible separation between elements.

"The compose window now also takes up less space with recipients listed in “pills” instead of an entire line for every address.."

Yup, already hate it. I much prefer not looking through a list of buttons on the To line for the one I want to remove. Additionally, I can instantly see if I'm sending and email to my coworkers company or personal address without some damn tag after his name.

Have you considered the SeaMonkey mail reader? It may be to your liking.

I know a few who swear by it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com