As a happy paying user of fastmail, I'm beyond saddened that they are wasting my hard-earned money in this... what, electron bundle?
There is already a fastmail desktop app. It's called thunderbird. And there are many more, for all possible tastes!
There is already a fastmail desktop app. It's called thunderbird. And there are many more, for all possible tastes!
You paid them for services rendered. They’ve offered an additional service they didn’t previously for no extra charge. Now you’re upset, even though you’re still getting the same service you were previously at the same price?
Electron is the most cost effective, least wasteful way to produce a desktop app on all 3 OSes. They’re providing a feature to people who wanted it, while wasting less money from ungrateful customers like yourself who don’t care. It’d cost much more to build & maintain a native desktop app when electron works just fine.
Fastmail are an awesome developer, JMAP is great, their mobile apps are great and actually offer some reason to exist, and I like their ethos as far as I can tell. None of this detracts from the fact making an electron app that does nothing other than shell a website, in nearly every case, is a waste of time.
I’d rather Fastmail ship their web client in Electron than waste engineering resources on reinventing the wheel for a client that’d get it’s own share of endless complaints from people wanting it to be more like Outlook or Thunderbird or Mutt.
But I admit that you got me curious, do you really expect a substantial increase in power consumption due to Fastmail getting a % of their customers to run Electron instead of Thunderbird? I'm really bad at this kind of back-of-the-envelope math but I struggle to imagine that it's substantial.
Like wouldn't one kid in Nebraska playing an AAA game in anger for half an hour, on one computer, once a day, use more energy than all those electron installs combined?
Lol, What do you mean your hard-earned money ? You already spent your money. It is their money now. Consumer != Investor.
Your equivalent is someone going to their local grocery store and asking them to sell stop selling Avocados because they are allergic.
That’s the beauty of open standards, everyone can choose their favorite tool for the job depending on their preferences and skill levels.
JMAP being Fastmails open source json api for email.
I don't think for instance this was keeping a lot of people from switching to Fastmail from let's say Gmail, which also doesn't offer a desktop client.
If Fastmail has an adoption problem it's still from people not wanting to pay for their email, a desktop app is not going to change that.
I could very easily imagine that if a company wants to switch over their employees from another provider where the users had an app that had email / calendar /contacts all in one app that they would like to have that same setup again on Fastmail. In the end packaging their web app in a wrapper to satisfy that need of certain customers groups doesn't seem like something that should be very controversial.
Not certainly, because that’s not how paying a subscription works. You would have to contact them too discuss directly paying for a specific feature. But potentially!
And what about them making this has detracted from your experience as a Fastmail user? I've found the desktop site to be perfectly fine, and they recently addressed my primary complain with the mobile app by allowing emails to be saved offline. I haven't found anything worrying that I feel their dev time needs to urgently address that was ignored due to this. Fastmail just works.
How so?
The one time I sent out a mass email using another server and it arrived in my spam folder, Fastmail Customer Service gave me instructions which would allow them to look at the email and help me figure out what the issue was, but I decided not to bother and didn't use that server again.
Is that one thousand plus? (Certainly not one million plus I hope.)
Either amount is pretty bad, although I suppose if you are a well-known person that people are trying to reach, that would make sense.
If not, and it's a bunch of newsletters or spam, I think you should try to make better email choices. (Be more discretionary with how you give out or publish your email address(es).)
Recently they let through a phishing attempt against their own service. It was clearly not from them (to me) and didn't have a green dot or whatever. I was surprised and a bit disappointed that I had to see it at all.
I like their service.
However, there is little movement in the desktop email app space anymore, so aside from their web app, I see no other clients supporting this.
Evolution added some nifty features lately (Markdown integration). And allows to use Client-Side-Decoration annd classic menus - usability wise awesome. Thunderbird got this year a complete redesign.
The other part are we as users.
Vote with your feet. Go to mailprovider with native app (and leave sane people alone)!
https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
* Non-native UI toolkit
* Massive waste of resources (CPU, RAM, Battery, Disk). Consumption of 500 MB RAM for idle is the norm.
* Slow.
* Often issues with autonomous, local operation.
* Security -> Browser Engine
* Linux: Evolution, Geary, K-Mail, Claws, whatever TUI application you prefer. And Thunderbird.
* macOS: Apple Mail or Thunderbird.
* Windows: Please. Stop using Windows. You harm other people. Start with using Thunderbird :)
TUI :)
Electron is used, when a company wants to save on developer. All users pay with suffering from bad UI and their hardware resources. In this case it is something nobody asked for?
For email, I mostly don’t care whether it takes too much RAM, if the app is usable. I work with it, then I close it. That’s my workflow, at least. I believe I’m not alone in this. My iPhone is the mini server that gets all the notifications for the emails I need. (By being connected with the default email client.) So, if I want to reply from my laptop, I’ll open my app. Otherwise it’s closed.
Flash was awesome. It was proprietary, unstable, insecure, but in other regards it was much better than competition at the time.
Electron is open-source, stable and secure (as long as you stay up to date).
You’re making a compliment.
> * Non-native UI toolkit
That’s a drawback, not a plus. You can’t easily style the app with CSS the way you want it (VSCode, Obsidian).
> * Massive waste of resources (CPU, RAM, Battery, Disk). Consumption of 500 MB RAM for idle is the norm.
Nonsense. Obsidian is sitting at 115 MB right now, zero CPU.
> * Slow.
Define slow.
> * Often issues with autonomous, local operation.
???
> * Security -> Browser Engine
The only real drawback so far. Can be mitigated by staying up to date.
> It is always better to use a well-working application with your native UI-toolkit
It is always better to use whatever works best for you and solves your problems. Not OCDing around technology and not playing identity wars with crazy people online.
> Electron is used, when a company wants to save on developer.
Also a big plus. Features are being delivered to all platforms with less money spent. Win-win.
> All users pay with suffering from bad UI and their hardware resources. In this case it is something nobody asked for?
You need to seek therapy if you’re “suffering” from application using the toolkit.
P.S. Thunderbird performs worse than ANY Electron app I’ve ever used, and I’ve been using Electron since its inception.
> I do have two questions. The app on my macOS system is using 700MB RAM; is that for Electron?
Shall we discuss any of the other claims? Your security solution are constant updates?
Invests in efficiency scales with users. Most things which suck are caused by laziness and cost saving. It would be far more efficient to help either Evolution, K-Mail and Thunderbird with access to special APIs and keep them stable.
VSCode isn't really styled with CSS if you're a user. It's done by some json or yaml. This kind of hack is required: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=be5invis..., and it's clearly not supported.
You know what does have theming? Win32, GTK and QT. GTK even uses CSS for it.
And unlike electron apps, when you change how a button looks in your GTK theme it affects all GTK apps rather than just the single electron app.
> Nonsense. Obsidian is sitting at 115 MB right now, zero CPU.
I just downloaded obsidian for the first time and launching it spawns 8(!) processes using a total of 827.3 MB of RAM. That's at the launch screen, before it's doing anything.
Of course it's using no CPU when idle. That's basically the bare minimum bar for any application. It's well known that javascript is at least an order of magnitude slower than C. That's where it's wasting CPU, not when it's idle.
> Define slow.
Well to start off with, I can count the seconds obsidian takes to start up. Most native apps I have installed (other than browsers) start faster than I can reasonably react.
Typing has noticeable lag, see: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/27378
And this is on a workstation computer, I don't want to imagine how terrible the experience is on low-end hardware.
> P.S. Thunderbird performs worse than ANY Electron app I’ve ever used, and I’ve been using Electron since its inception.
Thunderbird isn't a native app either. Just like electron it's using a browser engine to show the UI.
If your base is base-2, yes. (It is well-understood that when you don't have your thumb on the scale—e.g. selecting, whether deliberately or carelessly, poor/pathological code to benchmark—that the expected slowdown factor of executing on a mainstream JS engine instead of AOT is in the neighborhood of 2x to 4x. Of course browsers JIT instead of AOT out of necessity—a constraint that doesn't apply to programs loaded from disk.)
The same is true for Firefox: Almost the entire Firefox UI is written as HTML page with JavaScript. In fact, Firefox, Thunderbird and their predecessor Mozilla Suite were the first desktop apps written as webapps, and are the direct precedessors of Electron. And they also show that it can be done well. You just have to do it well, which is not easy.
There was a reason for that decision: Netscape tried to implement all its UI natively on 3 platforms - Windows, Mac and Unix -, which was too difficult in practice to keep them in feature parity. The big new thing about Mozilla - apart from the Gecko engine - was to implement the UI of the desktop app as web app, and run the same code on all platforms. That idea is the technical foundation of Mozilla.
Electron is just using that same idea with Chrome and node.js.
The only reason why using Linux as desktop today is realistic, is that web apps put an end to the monopoly of native Windows apps - which was the ultimate goal the whole time.
/Ben Bucksch Long-time core developer of Thunderbird
[1] https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/local/src...