Thunderbird's Desktop Calendar Visual Redesign | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird's Desktop Calendar Visual Redesign

blog.thunderbird.net

73 pointsbirdculture27 comments

Still no calendar where “today” is visually distinct. It has the same faded background as a multi-hour event.

Look,at the header image and glance in the middle of the Wednesday column vs the middle of Sunday’s or Monday’s column. Very little visual distinction: you have to ask, am I looking at a long event or the ‘today’ highlight?

Nor any visible control to quickly take you to "Today".

People who use calendars for work-related purposes typically want work-week focused views.

None of this is new. Which speaks to the people developing/designing this. (Or maybe they have incorporated this but the handful of screenshots aren't exposing them).

They aren't dogfooding this - or if they are - they aren't the power users - people whose typical day have more appointments scheduled than free time.

They need to seek out the power users so their design doesn't preclude use-cases (or at least make them very awkward).

Here's a freebie - for monthly view - the day that is highlighted should get a detailed day view as a sidebar.

> Nor any visible control to quickly take you to "Today".

Nor any way to view the week, starting with Today.

> They aren't dogfooding this

The year is 2026 and ThunderBird still insists what a single SMTP outbound server for all your accounts is totes fine. Sure, if you insist it would configure a separate one, but all SMTP configuration is under a separate "Ougoing Server (SMTP)" option and not under the account.

> They need to seek out the power users

They are in a fine and cozy place "giving value" and "providing the alternative to a corporate capture". They are not interested.

Huh? Can't you very easily tell by checking if there is a light strip on the side?

What do you mean by a light strip on the side? I see large vertical areas of subdued colour.

Ah - I see a border on some. You're right, that does distinguish it (and thanks) but my reaction there to the design is: wow, by so little. It's hardly intuitive or clear: the same representation for two completely different things where the only difference is a few left-side pixels :(

Many calendar apps use roundrects for items which helps for multi-day appointments/events because you can tell which is the start/left edge of the item and which is the end/right edge of the item.

I'm not sure what's displayed if the app shows the middle portion of an event that extends for more than one week - maybe a rectangle, if the rounded corners signify the beginning/ending of an event.

Personally, I like the Google design and I bet most users will be familiar with. It works. Do not reinvent the wheel and just make it efficient.

About ten years late to mimic Google Calendar. Was hoping for something new.

Fantastical, Readdle and Apple Calendar have slightly fresher UI that could be good inspiration.

I was an Outlook user for nearly 20 years. Switch to macOS last year, and along with that went with Thunderbird. It does need some love, but grateful it existed. I like to look at my monthly calendar, open two events, and compare them. Sometimes, I like my monthly calendar visible all by itself, then I'll open emails to the far left or right, then maybe an event in the middle, or to the left.

In other words, I like them all as separate windows, while I compare websites, notes, on the phone, and then adding or editing all these things while talking to people too.

Making the Calendar view, an the list of emails as two separate windows would be amazing.

Thank you Thunderbird team!

Dear writers, please don't give me "## The Big Picture"

A+ Thunderbird team! We absolutely needed an update. Maybe on the next moon mission NASA will send a functional email client instead of two broken ones.

How is thunderbird these days? I haven't used it for about six years, but I've seen their redesign and recent work in passing here on HN.

I'd like to get back to having a desktop email and calendar client over using a browser all the time.

If you don’t need cross-platform, there’s usually something better native to your platform of choice.

I’m preferring Evolution over it right now for Linux.

If you don’t need to deal with multiple email providers, your email provider might even have a better app. I’d rather use the FastMail desktop app but I have other email accounts with other providers.

A big pet peeve of mine is how Thunderbird is so bad at exporting your profile settings to multiple computers.

Usable, but buggy and poorly managed. The redesign introduced a severe slowdown for users having many folders.

I generally like it, but am I seeing right that the new event window is now a modal dialog? Why?? Composing a message is a normal that you can manage with your window manager and have multiple instances of - why not the even too?

The use-case is obvious: I might be making a new copy of an event and want to go to a previous one to copy some template text from, or I want to make a bunch of similar events and it's easier to enter data in parallel than in series. Maybe I need to find information scattered in a few emails and copy it into the calendar entry.

I still think we don't have good UI for picking start and end times. Anything that doesn't implement clicking and dragging to set events is missing the best way (In my opinion).

Google does it, I wish they went further. The calendar is a visual metaphor for time, let me interact directly with the visual metaphor, let me drag the boxes, resize them, etc.

So this is a new design, but it's at the design proposal stage and not yet implemented?

They've been talking about redesigning Thunderbird for years now, but I'm honestly not sure I've noticed any difference at all in my actual use.

Is it a full page of text to just say that they implemented the UI of Google Calendar?

That's a plus because people don't have to learn a new design, which is why how UI is done is closely regulated in every commercial OS, especially now with app stores. I just want it to be faster than outlook

... but with apparently broken HTML, per the comments.

I think it's a design mockup, they didn't implement it yet.

What's going on with those dialogs? Are they real dialog windows with hidden window decorations, or are they fake windows drawn inside the calendar view?

And why do they have what looks like a maximize/zoom button, a "..." menu button and a close button? This is a desktop application – we have real window borders for resizing, real menus for menus and real close buttons provided by the window manager.

> https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2026/07/post-screenshot-0...

Just another reminder what people who designs these things do not use them. Probably at all.

Useless left bar - eating space, useless top bar - eating much more limited vertical space, stupid arrows in BL corner without meaning or sense, stupid hamburger menu on the top right corner - because if you don't move the cursor a lot means you are not actually working.

...can someone tell me why the hell the macOS traffic lights are indented like that?

Like is this just a mockup I'm not understanding correctly?

Ya, I noticed that too. It doesn't seem to conform Apple HIG... but, let's be honest, even Apple isn't doing the greatest job with respect to keeping to their standards.

Apple, unlike Mozilla, gets to set the rules.

Traffic lights are one thing you shouldn’t mess with IMO.

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