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Comment by nik736 | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the look that was announced? [0] The announcement was way more modern than the screenshot that is shown now.

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

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I hate that "modern" nowadays equals "looks like VS code". Give me a menu and a toolbar with clearly associated keyboard shortcuts, I don't need a second dock (or even a first, i'm not on Mac). Tabletified webuis are inane for power users.

Welcome to the world of developers continuing to make design decisions based on their bubble.

As a designer + developer, it always frustrates me to see a design not translated into code well. If this is built using css, there really aren't any excuses for not making this look as slick as the visuals. Especially when the design doesn't appear to contain anything which looks especially difficult to recreate.

It's difficult to overemphasise how much this kind of thing gives users of your software confidence. The common assumption is, if it looks good, it works well (and the opposite).

Product Manager here. The answer is because we are tied to the ESR release cycle we have to release at a certain time (we are working on changing this). So we're shipping all the work that is done and stable. There is still work to be done to the front-end and as much as people want to trivialize it, it's not so simple. To make the changes we did, we had to rewrite a very complicated front-end with some code that has been there for 20 years and had entire systems built upon it. We are going to get to what the mockup showed. But we're going to build it right, and that means rewriting large pieces of our codebase. We'll ship the remaining stuff when they are ready.

Thank you for your dedication to this. I use Tbird every day, it is invaluable.

Looks like that page was edited a few minutes ago to remove the content/screenshots.

Here's what it looked like last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20230614035125/https://developer...

Totally agreed, I was so excited when I saw these mockups and I hate to be negative but the shipped changes so far are much less exciting.

Designer mockups and the actual end result don't always end up being the exact same for various reasons. Nothing a little CSS won't change, from what I can tell the biggest difference is the contrast on the panel edges and the background on the read/unread/selected messages.

The road map does state Q4 2022 as a target so I imagine the work has just taken too much time already and the version 115 deadline wasn't made.

If the UI platform you're using supports themes, this can usually be fixed with that. Provide one default theme that looks perfectly polished, and another more compact one for power users.

Which do you default to for someone coming from years of Thunderbird usage? How in-your-face is compact mode toggle in the ootb experience for a fresh install? And sadly how many people are going to be new to Thunderbird these days?

If I got the 'polished' version as part of the normal update cycle I'd be upset that my tight, space-efficient and incredibly responsive productivity app had decided to use a design language that reduces information displayed. The point of email is to communicate information and I now have to interact with the UI more than I did before to get the same amount of information.

The launched version hits the density that Thunderbird has been for about a decade and is what I'd prefer (ie the compact mode might be better for those being upgraded).

Best is to ask them in my opinion. After the update: „we have a new design, do you want to use it or do you want to stay on the more compact design? You can change it any time in the settings menu <placeholder>“. The dialog should have pictograms of both designs.

I'm seeing a density picker right on the announcement page. I don't think you need to use the calm, whitespaced version of the theme if you don't want to.

>"If I got the 'polished' version as part of the normal update cycle I'd be upset"

Thanks! Glad you mentioned it! On Linux the Thunderbird update is just one among many other updates in an update batch, so usually it will just be installed with the rest of the updatable items. I will have to pay attention now, so I don't install this unwittingly.

> "The point of email is to communicate information"

Deserves repetition.

> have to interact with the UI

This interaction is a cost, and you pay. I like mine cheap.

For Windows they're not pushing current 102 users to the new design yet. This matches some of the previous rollouts where the auto-upgrade branch is treated a bit more like 'stable' or 'ESR' might be in Linux and Firefox ESR.

That concept looks so much better than the result, it's not even close.

Yeah, agree with this. The design was miles ahead of what has actually been shipped. It's a shame, I feel like it could've done with more time spent on development to translate the designer's vision into code. They haven't even tried to port over the shadows on the messages (and have instead gone with an ugly thick border), the left sidebar has a different background colour to what was in the design, they're not using the shorter date/time formats, it generally feels much more cramped and less polished than the design. Even the selected folders are styled in an inferior way (using a de-saturated grey background instead of the blue-tinted light background and left border).

I don't want to take away from the work that has been done here, but like .. just copy the design? You can take screenshots and compare to the design until it matches. It looked amazing, I feel bad for the designer because their vision has really been lost in what's been implemented.

All those concepts are made by people who don't use computers on iPads.

Which is not that much of a problem for Thunderbird, which is released for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but not IOS. And the Android version is actually K9.

People designing it but not using it is not a problem?

You're speculating, so no?

I don't think it's a world apart. But the borders are darker in now than in the mockup, and the message card view is way denser. But I'm sure they'll refine these things.

the mock-up has very little information density. I think that would've pissed off a lot of folks, so they reverted it.

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