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Comment by NackerHughes | Hacker News Reader

Does it bring back the old, perfectly functional UI that everyone’s used for years? No? Hard pass. People don’t have the time to waste searching around for some button or menu item that the designers have moved somewhere else, buried in about:config or removed entirely. They force this ugly, garish mess of whitespace on us and tell us it’s the “most beautiful Thunderbird yet”. Maybe if enough of us cover our ears and clamp our eyes shut and shout that loud enough, it’ll become true. Me personally? I’m sticking with my trusty v102.12.0, thanks.

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And many people complained about the UI feeling dated before the change.

The new UI has a compact mode, I think you can get an even more compact UI than before. I've used thunderbird forever and I'm not lost at all. I think they did a really good job not breaking us.

I guess they can't please everyone but I don't know how they could have done better in this respect honestly.

Yes, the compact mode needs a bit of getting used to but is great in the end. A really nice makeover of the old view, even more compact.

Yes, could have been worse.

There were several minor amateur moves however. The menu bar in the wrong place for example—not sure what they were thinking. Also hardcoded the highlight color to blue (on purpose), disrespecting the system UI theme. Same thing happened ~twenty years ago with firebug and I was happy to drop it for FF dev tools.

Every few years a new batch of "senior" engineers needs to earn xp points.

For what it's worth, I upgraded to 115. I can't remember how long it's been. I forgot I upgraded because it doesn't seem that different to me. I still have pretty small fonts and very little spacing around things. Above my reading pane are buttons with words on them like "Reply All" and "Forward." Some menus are still hidden behind an oddly placed hamburger near the top right, just like they were before. Search is still pretty mediocre!

I don't see what the fuss is about. They made rather minor changes overall and gave the app a bit of a facelift. I personally like the changes (for example putting the keyboard shortcuts in the search bars... I don't recall them being there so prominently, but I like the reminder when I forget, and it doesn't get in the way when I don't.) Regardless, we cannot let stagnation be the answer.

I think the only prominent UI change that happened is that the bar that holds the search box, Write button etc is above the tab bar now instead of below.

Personally, I find it a bit jarring, because contextually, that bar only contains stuff related to mail, but that bar and some stuff on it continues to appear even when I switch to Calendar. Thankfully, some CSS takes care of this.

Otherwise, it is a quite nice change. Dark mode now also applies to mail contents as well, which is a great change, though I would like a shortcut to swap to light mode.

Two things:

1. the designers never considered keyboard navigation, which is now even more awkward than it was already

2. the interface is now very visibly slower - startup and general usage (on two of my systems)

This ignores the very long standing issues like:

1. searching is very confusing; there are several different types of searches

2. writing an email still requires opening another window. compose emails like it's the 90s!

It never occurred to me that I should not open a new window to compose an email. How would that work? Displace the folder I'm in, or the message I'm looking at? And why?

It should do it in a new tab. There have been discussions about it, but all the attempts have been abandoned due to spaghetti code.

My Thunderbird window is not full screen but it's larger than the mail composition one. I can use that extra screen space to look at other things while I write a message. Short messages go through WhatsApp and Telegram nowadays. Outbound email is for important matters, so it's not uncommon to look at reference material. A tab wouldn't do.

Inbound email is 99.9% notifications. I read and delete most of them with K9 on my phone before downloading what's left with Thunderbird. BTW my mailbox is on a POP3 server. I clear it after downloading the messages.

Thunderbird, like Firefox, already supports detaching tabs into new windows.

Why? I kinda like composing in a new window. I may want to read another email while replying to the current one.

After the big update I had to spend an hour restoring it to a functional state including changing an about:config parameter to get the scaling right. Out of the box I got changes that broke my UI and no "beautiful" new UI to begin with (you need to actively change settings to convert). Also there is still a giant clonky Win98 scrollbar on my folders, so getting that clean look in the marketing screenshots is impossible unless I severely reduce folders so I don't need the scrollbar. Why the scrollbar wasn't replaced with something more modern? No clue.

Obviously this subjective.

I personally never like the old UI, and though it still has ways to go, it's miles ahead of the old UI.

I could not disagree more vehemently. The old UI was ugly and clunky and anachronistic. I find the new UI much more readable, with a sensibly usable three-column layout, and much improved message list.

To each their own, I guess.

I am fine with its UI, but I really wish it uses gnupg instead of the built encryption. Or maybe have an option to force the use of gnupg.

Agree. The new UI is crap.

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