Thunderbird Supernova Preview: The New Calendar Design | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird Supernova Preview: The New Calendar Design

blog.thunderbird.net

Looks nice to me, granted I have not been following Thunderbird, as I believed it to be dead[0] over a decade ago. Its nice to see that the community has keep it alive!

For Thunderbird users, do you find it interfaces well with Google Workspace Email (Gmail) and Calendar? I prefer native clients to their interface usually but Apple Mail isn't the greatest so I've been using the web interface and I don't particularly enjoy it.

I use BusyCal for calendar and I like it, but I'd love to have it in a "suite" like this, just makes things easier.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-furth...

The only problem I've had with GMail via Thunderbird is that some orgs block IMAP access.

I've been quite happy with Calendar as well. You don't get real-time sync and all of the Google Calendar goodies like viewing other people's schedules, adding Google Meet links easily, room booking and probably more are missing. But I've found that using it as mostly view-only works well, then I schedule meetings in the webUI.

That being said the calendar interface has been fairly awkward in the past, so I'm really excited about this new version. I'm sure there will be some rough edges but if they can fix the alignment of events with respect to start+end time and make the view/edit dialog less awful it would be a huge win.

I've used Thunderbird with GMail for years, using POP, not IMAP.

It works well. However, in the last few months, the GMail Spam filtering service has stopped working with POP. Items marked as Spam in GMail still get downloaded.

I guess Google wants us to use their web-client.

What are the benefits of using POP instead of IMAP?

Presumably privacy and security related. IMAP keeps a copy of the email on the server, while POP deletes it

I learnt this the hard way in the early days of interneting. Lost all my emails after an IBM hard drive died on me and my email client was using POP to retrieve mail.

DeskStar? I also lost everything to one of those drives.

Fortunately I had (some) backups

It sure was!

I remember them being nicknamed DeathStars.

Pop can be configured either way, but what I wonder: doesn't this presume you only ever use one client? For me that would not work at all. Unless you sync mail between your clients another way, then I am all ears.

No, because you can keep the mail on the server. But you said that yourself.

I am pretty sure IMAP can be configured to delete mail from server after sync, and anyway Google has all the time in the world to scan your emails before you delete them.

The Calendar sync via the gdata-provider plugin is currently broken.

It works fine, unless you want to use Google Calendar and a non-Gmail email together. Then it goes nuts and makes your Gmail send out calendar invites instead of the email you use.

Oh god, I have some horrible memories when I set up a forwarder from employers Lotus Notes calendar to my Google Calendar. It turned out that Google was very aggressively parsing the body test and recipients of all events and re-sending invites. Also for that company all hands meeting I was invited to, in my first week. No way to disable this, so ended up having to write some custom parser for exported ics files, to strip out the email addresses.

Evolution is working fine with the setup I described, try it out if you need to do this again.

I also prefer native clients so I have been using the https://mimestream.com/ beta and it has been working great for me.

Actually it was the best option I had on Linux for O365 corporate email client. They added OAuth support probably during the past 2 years and they added some important features to the calendar notification about a year ago. The calendar has always been kind of behind though. It definitely wasn't dead but absolutely lots of room for growth. This post made me excited.

This looks great!

One minor thing I'd like to see, and I don't know if this is to do with the underlying calendaring spec, is the differentiation of physical location and online meeting.

Some events may have both and I have found the "Join" buttons on desktop notifications for Outlook/Teams to be pretty convenient.

I really really like that Thunderbird is getting maintenance and new features even when I thought it had been abandoned by Mozilla years ago. Though I'm currently using Mail.app (and having used web mail before), I'm curious what happened, who are the developers, how the funding is going, what the relation to Moz is, and whether I should switch?

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

I also use Mail.app privately but Thunderbird on any Windows or Linux machine I work with. Outlook might look nice, however, I can’t bring myself to spend time to figure out the calendar in Outlook. When Thunderbird was not available, I’ve defaulted to looking up my appointments on Google calendar in the browser because that’s what my team at work is using.

I'd really like it work with Office365 out of the box. I know there are add-ons that do it (Owl being one of them), but native support just like the support for Gmail accounts would be great.

Another happy Owl user here.

One thing that I actually like about Owl being paid (very inexpensive as it is) is that I trust it will be updated RIGHT NOW if Office 365 changes their non-API. As a business with paying customers, I expect that they are on top of these things.

This is the only real downside of Thunderbird as far as I’m concerned, other things like aesthetics just being matters of taste where you can’t please everyone. It’s become an annoying downside for me lately because one of my email addresses now only supports the web client and Exchange; no more IMAPS. I really cannot find another email client on Linux that works as well as Thunderbird though, at least not one that also supports Exchange, so Thunderbird it is. The new UI in OP looks great too.

Really excited about the addition of FFSync, but man do I wish they would properly open source the backend so I can self-host it. (There is some code available online but it doesn't really work)

Be nice of them to fix outstanding bugs, like the nondeterministic turing machine that is doing anything with certificates in Thunderbird e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481969

The javascript disaster that is the compose window refuses to find certificates that NSS finds, because... something to do with intermediate certificates.

Signing messages is a feature thunderbird has had forever, yet is unstable and nobody is dealing with the obvious open issue in their bug tracker, open since v60 and ignored.

Honestly what I want from an email client is this, plus cardbook (the default address book can't talk carddav, what century are we in), plus calendars. That's it. That's what I want a mail client to do.

Thunderbird has had native CardDAV support for a while now. I’ve been able to ditch Cardbook (although the latter has more functionality).

Everytime an application I use daily gets a redesign, my palms gets sweaty

Same but I find the new recent design to be a betterment this time. Not hard considering Thunderbird had imho a terrible UI. The left panel looks really nice and make the app different functions more readable.

Just please please please fix the calendar so that online meeting links make it properly into the notes section of appointments.

I've been using Thunderbird for both work email and personal email (via Protonmail Bridge) for a few years now. I'm really stoked to see it's getting the attention it deserves.

Yes, it is great.

I have to use Outlook 365 and am surprised how much better Thunderbird is than Microsoft's offering.

I use Thunderbird exclusively for personal accounts and Outlook for my employer.

Very excited to see Thunderbird calendar being modernized since I feel like it’s always been a step behind Outlook’s.

> By default, getting to this event preview screen requires only 1 click. And it’s 2 clicks to open the edit view (which you can do either in a new tab or a separate floating window).

Phew. I was a bit worried that tab support was going away because the UI in the screenshots with the giant search bar in the top toolbar doesn't seem conducive for it. I'm curious to see how tabs look/work with the new UI.

Wow, super neat! I use TB as my daily driver but for calendar I resort to the GCal webview because is almost unusable, especially the "view event" window which is also an "edit event" window and that is very visually cluttered.

Can't wait to test this on my laptop!

I started using Thunderbird when my old Mac's "Mail" app basically croaked. I bought a newer used Mac a couple months ago and got the latest version of both Thunderbird and Apple's Mail app.

Both of them were much easier to set up, and Apple's Mail app is a lot better now in that regard so I used both of them for a few weeks and Thunderbird won me over.

Fair to say that after using it for so long it was more familiar but it's noticeably faster and the latest version has updated the UI and it's very clean and compact.

I don't use the calendar, but I do think the new design is a big improvement and it's great to see they've been working on it.

Do not want mail program talking to some third party cloud service.

Such as an email server (POP, IMAP, SMTP)?

Ouch

That's the second party. Some outside cloud provider connected to the mail client brings in a third party.

I thought the user was the second party.

Anyway, assuming you're talking about Sync, I find it quite helpful for the browser so have no issues with it being extended to Thunderbird. It is, as I understand it, always optional, and I even believe it's possible to self-host it, though I haven't tried.

every once in a while I look into what it takes to self host it and never get very far. The primary problem is that it is an internal tool used by mozilla and it shows, Don't get me wrong, I think it is great that mozilla provides the code but it does not have any of the polish that a tool intended for others to use get. I am sure I could get it going if I devoted a weekend to the effort. but have not yet been willing to put that much time into it.

off my head, first you have to get the account service up and running then you can get the sync service going then you have to trick your firefox installation to use your services.

I do as long as it's end to end encrypted.

That said it would be even better if I could sync through my own Nextcloud instance instead of through Mozilla Sync.

You can? I sync multiple nextcloud accounts with Thunderbird. Calendars and contacts with caldav and carddav.

Firefox sync is end to end encrypted. Thunderbird sync probably is too.

I do, too. But that doesn't sync everything that Firefox sync does. But yeah, it's 90% there, and people running their own Nextcloud instance is obviously very niche.

You can just self host your own Mozzila Sync server too! There's documentation on self-hosting, just not sure how easy or difficult it is...

I wonder if it's some of the same work BetterBird is doing?

https://www.betterbird.eu/

Do CardDAV and CalDAV work natively yet?

They work already! When I add my email account, Thunderbird automatically configure my email, my calendar, my contacts, my tasks... all from my server. I even don't have to configure them each one manually.

Really? Wow! Ive never been able to get everything from fastmail to come over correctly. My calendars were read only and I didnt get full contact info.

I've been using both those features for a while with my own Nextcloud server

Yes but you need tbsync to use it with nextcloud cal/carddav no?

I don't have tbsync and I don't think any other extension I use added support for that.

Simply select "On the Network" when adding a calendar, set a user name and enter the remote dav location. For address books use "Add CardDAV Address Book", also username and dav location.

Why on earth does "month" view still exist in digital calendars? Even worse, many (e.g. Google, Microsoft) don't even have an option for anything better (Thunderbird has "multiweek" which is far more useful).

Can anyone think of another relic from paper-based systems that we still cling to for unknown reasons? Imagine if the web could only be viewed in whole "pages".

But pages don't even negatively affect reading prose that much. Calendars, on the other hand, are all about context. On the first of the month I get the context of the next few following weeks. Useful. But at the end of the month I get the few preceding weeks?! What good is that? Why would my needs change depending on the time of the month? I either need the context or I don't. Month view makes absolutely no sense.

What are the odds of this coming to a standalone Sunbird client?

I've never really liked my email and calendar being in the same app. Especially not the same window, makes cross referencing a PITA. One of the things Apple gets right.

I understand this doesn't address your core complaint, but you can right click on the calender tab in Thunderbird and open it in a new window. It's not the same thing at all, but it's a workaround I use.

Very relieved to see that the new calendar looks...like a calendar. It is definitely not an area that needs some radical redesign. Incremental quality changes are the way to go.

While it looks nice, can I please not have another problematic Thunderbird update, please.

I am still on 91.13.1 because 102 is causing various issues, most (maybe all) of them already reported.

I upgraded to v102 and have had zero issues.

In fact, it runs perfectly on my Kubuntu machine.

Which experience does nothing to help the poster you're replying to.

How could it help if OP didn't outline any issues he might have?

Both comments are the same thing just from opposite sites.

I think it's meant to help other readers of the post.

Yes, the v102 upgrade was a nightmare for many users. I actually had an exchange about that with the person behind Thunderbird's Twitter account after their announcement of Supernova:

> Neat. Please do test this thoroughly before release to avoid the v102 fiasco :). It made things difficult for both users and evangelists who take time to help others in using Thunderbird. [1]

> We hear you. Which is why we're doing this for Supernova: [2]

>> In the roadmap for Thunderbird Supernova (v. 115) you'll notice our goal is to complete most features by Q4 2022. That's because we're entering"feature-freeze" by end of 2022, then spending several months on polish. We want it to exceed your expectations!

[1] https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/1590400298517864448

[2] https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/159040241315584409...

Who would have thought civil exchanges about an issue was possible on the internet. And that too on Twitter!

Well done to you and the Thunderbird Twitter manager, along with the Thunderbird team that took action on trying to rectify the mistakes they made with their past release.

My number one feature request for Thunberbird is the automatic display of all conversations from a contact, when I'm reading an email message from them. Lack of this feature is the primary reason I've switched to an alternative email tool. I suspect it would be quite a lot of work to implement, though. Wish I knew even the basics of the Thunderbird codebase, but it is very far outside of my basic hacking ability.

What email tool do you use now?

I've tried a few with this feature, not totally happy with any of them.

Em Client

Missive

Mailspring

Why can literally nobody get calendar month views right? It should be a continuously scrollable list of weeks. Not a book with each month on a different page. It's not paper. Grrr.

Actually once upon a time the Android calendar did work like that... but then they changed it back to the traditional idiotic design.

CalenGoo does it like that and it's the one feature of CalenGoo i wish I could turn off! I like the book pages. I guess there really is a preference for everyone

Doesn't it annoy you when events span the month boundaries and you have to keep flipping back and forth between them and finding the corresponding days?

I might have to try CalenGoo!

This would look a lot better with 'real' event titles. The top level picture has "Event title" repeated about a million times, so everything looks the same; in practice events are much more distinct. The later ones are slightly better, at least.

This is an honest question from someone who didn't use nor install Thunderbird for over a decade.

Is it better than Google calendar? I mean, am I missing a lot by using the Google apps as they are from a browser? I hope I am, to be honest, so I can give it a try.

One advantage is that it supports displaying events from multiple Google accounts at the same time. :)

Weirdly enough, this is what happens in mobile too but not in desktop, for reasons that are unknown to me.

You can always share your calendar from one account with another, and hide/show it in the right panel ;)

I seem to be the only one here who really does not want a calendar in an e-mail application. They are different things, and should imho be separate programs. Same for chat and tasks.

I hope sync with apple calendars will work out of the box. It’s just a pain right now (events disappearing randomly without any way to debug)

Since I already have Thunderbird, I'm starting to wonder if I should swap off VueMinder for Thunderbird's calendar. Anyone used both and thoughts?

Will it connect with Gnome Online Accounts by default?

Really looking forward to the firefox sync integration!

Great update. Its awesome to see sync is getting implemented, that makes on-boarding on new machine trivial. Calendar needed this too.

the grid lines seem too intense (dark). please make them the same intensity as the calendar border in the top left corner.

Looks like there might be a bug with the calendar, it is showing the date for Saturday as March 6 instead of March 5.

The only new Thunderbird calendar feature I'd like to see it the ability to turn off calendaring in Thunderbird.

It seems that Supernova is the name of "the new Thunderbird UI". Oh please not. I'm so jaded regarding updates to core functionality software.

Is there a list of actual problems with the old Thunderbird UI? Ones that could not be resolved without a rewrite? Otherwise, what is the goal of updating this extremely functional UI?

In future it would be cool to see integration of Emacs's org-mode agenda

In principal, you could syn your org-mode agenda with Google calendar then view it in Thunderbird https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html

Drive both from the same CalDAV calendar: https://github.com/jackkamm/org-caldav/tree/fix-tests. Todo sync works pretty well too.

I can't wait !!!

Finally, a much needed redesign for Thunderbird. I cant wait to switch from Geary

Are they using vanilla JavaScript?

This doesn't look all that different to the existing calendar really. They have moved the events section to the side instead of at the top and changed some of the sectioning going for the material view where the distinction between elements is just replaced with background coloured space. I am largely indifferent to this change, it doesn't look like its big or important or functionally impressive in any way. I am not going to collapse the weekends and it seems to be the only other new feature being offered is messing with colours for categories. I suspect most people use calendars for categories already, this may be an improvement for some people but its really not worth trying to merge calendars for this purpose as an existing user unless they make that easy (which there is no suggestion they will).

Change for fashion sake and nothing that users have been asking for, sums up all development out of Mozilla at the moment.

It's easy to say that, but I've had friends and colleagues not want to use Thunderbird because of it's UI. Honestly I think this would be enough to make them take a second look.

The fact that you are indifferent (as am I) is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.. They've made it more attractive to new users and also haven't alienated their existing user base.

There are so many things that could be better though that users actually request. Fixing the whole event -> View -> Edit that appears in windows (instead of tabs like emails) would be nice. Being able to select drag when you want to view as well since the top left calendar becomes largely useless. They could clear up the start/end display so events not crossing days didn't display the date twice. Would be nice to be able to review an event quickly just by clicking on it once instead of having to open and close a window, summaries have too much burden to them to appear modern.

Its a really old UI style from the 1990s and I am not seeing anything in this suggesting that will change. People will very quickly realise it does not behave in a modern way once they try to use it.

I wonder if people reporting issues is a negative signal for the priority of fixing them?

Like if someone cares enough to report an issue, they're probably invested and will stick around. If they didn't care, they wouldn't bother to report the issue.

You need to fix the issues that cause people to just give up and go elsewhere - the issues that don't get opened!

I completely disagree with you. Should we go back to 90s website design just because users didn't ask for modern design practices?

Thunderbird's calendar redesign brings it in line with what customers expect from a calendar app and make it more user friendly.

Oh god, can we? Please?

> I completely disagree with you. Should we go back to 90s website design just because users didn't ask for modern design practices?

So, a bunch of text with the content you want/need and a photo?

And we replaced that with multi-megabyte javascripts, autoplaying video ads, floating bars, breaking infinite scroll, breaking ajax, refresh that returns you to another page, not-working "back" buttons, popups asking to signup for a newsletter, to register, to fill out a survey, cookie popups, a bunch of sliders to disable all of them, notificiation request popups, location requests, etc?

Yeah, i like even this:

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

a lot more than:

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/

There were plenty of terrible, unusable sites in the 90s, and there are tons of great ones now. People look back with crazy rose tinted glasses at these sorts of things.

cnn.com is ~23 megabytes today.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk is 8.5mb, two bottom bars (accept cookies and login/signin), and after scrolling a page and a half down, i get a popup forcing me to login/signup.

Even relatively empty google is 1.8mb

This page (HN) is one of the few, that are not bloated, and allow you to read stuff without giving your personal data.

> Should we go back to 90s website design just because users didn't ask for modern design practices?

At least for news sites yes, please.

news.ycombinator.com uses 90s website design and works great

Yes. Emphatically yes.

https://isp.netscape.com/

Is Thunderbird a website?

SerenityOS has a better UI than all other Linux distributions. 90s inspired. So yes I guess?

Only if you are nostalgic for that sort of thing. It's not actually any better to use than basically any other distro I've tried.

Not necessarily. The space waste in "modern" distros is insane.

Not only Linux DEs are to blame here, Windows does it to (sometimes). Probably all stemming form the handicapped mobile interfaces.

Remarkably, SerenityOS is actually an independent OS with its own kernel, not a Linux distribution.

>Should we go back to 90s website design

You mean, like the one we are all reading right now?

Please, yes.

Thunderbird’s current UI makes it look like abandonware. It needed a UI refresh. The fact that they’ve managed to do this and make it look fresh while still not changing the workflow and the functionality drastically, so it won’t trouble long time users, is a great achievement.

I can keep working with the current (and past) Thunderbird interface forever. Some software is done and it needs updates only to keep up with changes to the OS and to protocols. Thunderbird is one of them IMHO.

I don't even use IMAP, nor calendar. I download from POP3 servers and use the calendar on my phone instead.

So you're not the target audience for this at all then.

If they get to a point where Android and Desktop Thunderbird have email, contacts and calendars synced, with a UI that's as nice as this mock it will be fantastic.

Sounds like OP is exactly the type of person who thunderbird should be targeting because it's impossible to compete on UI churn against google/facebook/apple. They have legions of graphics designers who need to do something to keep being employed. Open Source seems to have become a resume item for second rate devs to get hired into closed source companies.

I have to disagree. I've been using Thunderbird for well over a decade and I appreciate that the UI hasn't changed much. As I get older I much prefer software that changes slowly and incrementally, if at all - and sometimes no change is good, especially in the UI.

UI is the part of software most prone to fashion. Fashions go in and out, and UIs and their usability goes in and out with them. I would rather stick to a usable, well-known UI than have TB be trendy and strictly worse, like the "flat everything" fad, or the "you don't need options" fad, or the "header bar" fad.

I specifically have not picked up Thunderbird as a local mail client because it looked like Mozilla would drop it at any moment.

I am not sure if you aware but Thunderbird was indeed droped by mozilla and now it is independent project, with quite a lot money from donations so they seem to be good for the future

That's right, it had been so long that I had forgotten. Thanks for reminding me.

Edit: Taking a further look into the history, it looks like the project has been under a lot of turmoil WRT shutting down and being revived. Explains why I have avoided it for so long.

OP said the workflow hasn't changed, only the aesthetics. Are you saying TB's workflow has changed, not just the aesthetics?

Isn't, it, basically? Isn't 99.9% of the world using some sort of webmail/office/apple mail?

It certainly doesn't feel like it tho.

>Thunderbird’s current UI makes it look like abandonware.

The type of person who cares about that will not be using it anyway. Trying to be hip is how firefox when from 30% market share to 3%. Stop going after people who don't care but are very loud.

I for one am glad with this visual cleanup. Thunderbird looks cluttered, and at least for me most of the clutter isn't useful, unlike certain other very busy, dense interfaces.

The last redesign (the mail client, not the calendar) is what prompted me to finally abandon it. Each redesign in Mozilla products, be it Firefox or Thunderbird, seems to make them worse. At that point I don't know of a good GUI mail client for Linux[1]. I'm spending more and more time on Mac these days, where in the case of mail clients I'm using Mailmate and am very satisfied.

I've moved to mutt on emacs. I don't want change for changes sake. I want something I can use that gets out of the way.

When’s the last time a UI made any major software product better?

Yeah. Honestly, I guess I cannot speak as a Thunderbird calendar user anymore, but precisely for that reason: it sucked so much compared to ubiqotuos Google Calendar, that I somehow couldn't justify using it anymore. Then I stopped using Google too, but I use desktop email client much less anyways now.

I'm not sure what really changed here. Maybe I should try and see it, but... really, I wish they'd just copied Google Calendar UI completely, making it an offline copy. Surely it's not perfect, but it was so, so much more fluent the last I tried. I mean, for me, it kinda did everything I wanted to, the only problem I ever had with it was that it's Google.

This looks very good, but it's still a long way away.....

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