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Comment by mcjiggerlog | Hacker News Reader

So much negativity in this thread, jeez.

I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04.

Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one being the lack of conversation view, which is how pretty much everybody expects an email client to work in 2023. Supernova implementing that is reason enough to be excited about the release.

I can't wait to try it out - keep up the awesome work, team!

[0] https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-supernova-p...

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Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

And that is the main problem, new designer shows up and doesn’t bother to implement the previous layout or workflow. Effectively hobbling the interface when all us real users wanted were bug fixes.

Hopefully won’t happen this time.

> Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

I'd say that you're in a small enough minority that most people will design right past you, just like most websites have an acceptable minimum percentage of browser feature availability after which you can make that feature a requirement for functionality.

Especially as screens tend to get wider, not thinner.

I see what you're saying, but wouldn't it be also great if there was a mail app that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.

> that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.

If you want something really small, perhaps mutt in a terminal could work. :)

Lots of screens are getting squarer again. Macs are 16:10+, my framework and MS surface are 3:2. And a few portrait folks.

But usually that's just an extension upward, pixel density wide.

> Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

And even if we do, having an interface that can work as a square, or a rectangle but vertical (for screens that can rotation 90˚), is also useful.

Not all of us run our apps in full screen (which seems to be quite prevalent in the Windows world), but rather 'tiled' or stacked, sometimes with different windows of different apps overlapping (handy on laptops).

Thanks for sharing, I hadn't seen these.

With all the negative comments in the thread I had expected some kind of massive changes but it basically looks the same. Sure, nitpick about this or that but in the end the overall look remains nearly identical (for calendar, again, havent seen the other screens).

The design doesn’t look too bad to me, with exception to that big empty top bar. It feels really awkward.

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