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Comment by joiqj | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate that they have maintained information density. otoh I think they should try and stick as much as possible to the looks of the OS where thunderbird is running - you are building a desktop application, not a website.

Of course it's pretty hard when not even microsoft seems to know what Windows should look like.

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Remind you, that Microsoft wants go get rid of its Microsoft Office and will make it a Website only.

OneNote was the first one to go from a full office program to be some Modern-UI program, and I have to say that the lost of features is concerning. Like now, you can't easily integrated excels in onenote.

Yet, even with those limitations, it is still the mot powerful note application out there. So... I still use it.

I imagine that it will be a similar situation with the rest of the office suite.

That Modern one was the version that was actually usable, but they discontinued it.

This is only half true. They are still going to provide a hybrid application that will be usable offline. And there is a huge benefit: there may finally be feature parity for all platforms including Linux.

Microsoft positions Outlook for big corporate customers. They often need extensibility in their clients. Preferably you implement them only once to run on any client (web, Windows, macOS, Linux, mobile, ...)

First, I don't think they'll be able to. I have had the displeasure of using their web Outlook client and it was absurdly buggy for a software company of the stature of Microsoft. I can only imagine how terrible the web version of a complex software like Excel will be. Not to mention the poor performance. There's no way they will lose all of their finance customers like that... but, it's Microsoft, so... who knows.

Second, Office hasn't really looked like Windows for like... the past 20 years.

> I can only imagine how terrible the web version of a complex software like Excel will be.

It's actually not that terrible, but I believe it's nowhere near feature parity. Not to mention there is a galaxy of add-ons that still need to be rewritten from scratch to work on the web version, and a lot of people cannot live without them.

Excel is a classic case of 80% of users requiring 20% of all functionality, but that 20% being different for each user. Still, Microsoft made it very clear that the future is web-first.

> feature parity

They don't seem to care.

For my part, LibreOffice Calc does all of what I want Excel to do, although not quite as smoothly. But I'm much happier donating to them than paying Microsoft.

If you don't have feature parity, you really are in trouble, because then you are competing with Google Sheets, on which actually competent engineers are working.

It's not the competence of the individuals that makes the difference. Microsoft is also full of Very Smart People. Organizational structure and ego management strategies drive the engineering choices that lead to bad software.

Sorry, but imo Office/Microsoft 365 passed Google's options a while ago and have only gotten farther ahead. Either work for my needs, and I'm shifting to self-hosted OnlyOffice, but MS is definitely ahead on this one.

Microsoft Outlook is already a web app at its core: "The point here being that Mail and Calendar are native Windows applications, whereas the new Outlook for Windows is essentially a web app at its core, from what we can tell."

Native is dead as it seems, at least for he Microsoft Office Team.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/20/microsoft_calendar_ma...

Someone correct me if wrong but "outlook for windows" is not the same as "office outlook". The first one seems like it was created to fill the hole of outlook express and the mail app that came out later. i.e. the free email application that windows ships with.

There are actually four "outlook" implementations now.

1. Outlook desktop - old MFC / win32 crapfest

2. Windows Mail / Calendar - new WPF crapfest.

3. O365 online outlook / outlook.com - fat web app.

4. "New" Outlook - this is a fat Electron style app based on the web app.

The latter is actually pretty good - been using it for a couple of months. This is apparently going to replace all the other ones on the desktop.

> The latter is actually pretty good - been using it for a couple of months

You must be using a different New Outlook than me. I've been conscripted into trying it before the mass rollout to the rest of my company. It's so slow and missing so many features from the Old Outlook that it's only really usable for the most basic tasks.

5. iOS Outlook

6. MacOS Outlook

I think they're all heading in a direction to use the web-app as the core.

iOS Outlook is surprisingly good, though. Much better than gmail's and protonmail's ios clients.

Users can't run macros or create macros in the office webapps. Seems like a major step backwards in usability.

> Although you can't create, run, or edit VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros in Excel for the web, you can open and edit a workbook that contains macros. Any existing macros will remain in the workbook, and you can open the workbook in the Excel desktop app to view and edit the macros.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/work-with-vba-mac...

IIRC, there's work on a JS/TS capable macro API that can be used in the future. I will say, the effort MS has made to feature parity for Office's web interfaces is pretty impressive. I also say this as I've been planning to move my personal usage completely to self-host options (NextCloud, OnlyOffice, etc).

"New Outlook" is so bad. And somehow still makes you go into a different webapp to handle todos?

Thunderbird, for better or worse, has always had its own unique look. The reason is pretty simple. They don’t have the resources to create a “universal” design that works across OSes.

And multi platform capabilities are one of the top goals for Thunderbird.

I think it makes sense that they accept they’re unlikely to achieve a decent OS specific look and therefore they’re focused on creating its own unique style.

Information density can be very overwhelming and a factor for stress. Often a lower density is totally enough and less stressful to use. Providing an optional "compact mode" for people with smaller screens or who prefer denser layouts would be my way to go.

I’m interested to know where this idea comes from. Is there a good reference you recommend? My anecdotal experience has been that low density websites like Medium are more stressful than higher density websites like Substack/HN because I have to do more work to read the text on the page.

I agree with you. Low-density desktop applications cause me more unease because there's more need to scroll to make sure I didn't miss something. It's especially egregious when the designers make the scrollbars invisible (appearing only on hover or use), meaning there's often no indication of more content available via scrolling. It breeds the habit of ritualistically scrolling each pane to make sure you're not missing something.

There's something psychological about the appearance of a low-density display as well. I can't quite explain it, but it causes me a bit of displeasure because it feels wasteful. There are so many pixels available but they aren't doing anything for me. I don't know why this causes me discomfort, but it does.

Finally, it's important for an application like a mail client to not lose sight of the fact that the way people use email varies. I personally use dozens of folders, meaning the density of the folder list should be as compact as reasonably possible so that I don't need to scroll.

I don’t know. Not an UX expert. But I think the key is the right amount of information. Too much and not enough is both equally bad.

But we have much bigger screens than many years ago when thunderbird was initially designed.

Laptop screens stayed mostly the same sizes, so it makes sense to adjust density to the device type you are using or the window size. This is already done for smartphones, mobile websites usually have much smaller paddings. Same is usually done for iOS vs iPad apps.

There's some memories I have, mostly applicable to text/terminal applications... that productivity generally falls off when you have more than a dozen or so actions on the screen at a time. That people are usually better off with sub-menus or other contextual menus over too many options.

I find the UX for GMail, for example to be particularly good, not perfect but very very good for the task. The biggest issue I have with gmail is really folder and rule management.

That's not really comparable though. Medium and substack have one main item: the text (and its headings) while a mail application has the mail content, the subject, replies, timestamps, etc. and you can see a long list of email in a pane plus a list of folders, then you have the actionable items (reply, send, find, etc.). There are more information and actionable items on the list that in an article read in a browser.

> Information density can be very overwhelming and a factor for stress.

Really? And what about tiny scrollbars?

Since we have mouse wheels and touch screens scroll bars transformed mostly away from interactive UI components to scroll position indicators. Good components dynamically get bigger when you hover over them with your mouse or long press they on a touch screen.

Scroll indicators are fine if they stay visible. The default on mobiles and macOS is that the scroll indicator disappears once you stop scrolling. There was a webpage where I couldn't tell that an area was scrollable until I found out by accident, at which point I enabled the scrollbars to always show on macOS as I didn't want to get tripped up by that again

> "Since we have mouse wheels and touch screens ..."

Oh, how I hate that use of "we"! Please realize: "YOU" does not equal "EVERYONE"

Personally (sample size 1) I use several different PC-like hardware units for productive work, as well as personal use. These units have different hardware/software/OS in general, but some applications are used cross-platform: Email is one. Hence the need for Thunderbird in the first place. I have been using it for no less than a decade and probably much longer - iow as long as I remember.

The fact is that none (0, zero) of the total amount of hardware units I personally use _at_all_ "... have mouse wheels and touch screens" - not a single one.

I am not a robot! I exist, and I'm a core user of that product (which has become increasingly annoying in multiple ways during the years - way too narrow scroll bars are actually a good example of the dev team undermining usability - but there is no feasible alternative).

It seems the team is operating from some assumptions about user preferences that generally does not include (the likes of) me.

(ADDED: which would be fine if my demands were higher than their aility to deliver, but that is not the case. I only ever use the very basic core functions (read, write, folders; not even search) - no UI features added the past 5-10 years have been relevant for me. All of them have cost me time/productivity as anything new in the UI (no matter how minor) requires a breach of habit and a new learning loop, even if just to ignore said new feature.)

So, for the past couple of years my personal use of email has been on a steady decline. I just tend to avoid that kind of activity when/if I can.

ADDED: Don't preach me webmail in replies please. I did write "there is no feasible alternative" because that was exactly what I ment to say. Same goes for "just join the dev team and make a change yourself". I have actually considered these, but then: There IS NO feasible alternative. And that is the singular reason I still have Thunderbird installed even if used sparingly these days

I would recommend you subscribing to an anger management course.

Tiny scrollbars drive me nuts. But they're not nearly as annoying as almost nonexistent window frames!

Windows is pretty consistent if you ignore all the .net stuff. Just pretend that win32 is the only way to build Windows apps.

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