> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users
Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.
I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.
For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings.
Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that parts of the window sometimes flash for seemingly no reason when it is left open for a while.
> I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.
I can't complain about performance. My profile folder is ~90 GB. I have multiple email accounts connected and a large local folder which contains email from Google Takeout since I had to delete some (larger) emails from my Google mail to make space. That being said, it would be nice to not see application not responding messages on Fedora (Gnome) as much.
In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.
I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process
I prefer email sitting in the outbox for a short period of time before send/receive completes, it has saved me from mistakes enough times that it is worth the delay.
You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.
The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.
The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.
>You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.
I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up
> The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.
You can set it to maildir style, sadly impossible after account creation and requires unbelievably much effort for such simple change.
Like, this piece of shit asked me to restart client to change IMAP server name, who wrote that garbage?
Out of curiosity: We're talking "magnitude higher", so that means 1k to 5k mails each day.
How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?
On my Linux machine, there's noticeable latency when scrolling through the messages pane. I use the vertical (side by side) layout, but the delay disappears when I use the stacked layout. The jankiness seems to be a function of the messages pane's height.
Outlook is very slow for me, but I only use it on my work laptop.
Thunderbird is almost as slow, and that's on my own desktop.
Even something simple like mousing over emails in the list is slow - there is a noticable delay between the mouse reaching each email, and the grey highlight.
I moved from claws-mail (because O365 now requires oauth and non-thunderbird experience with it is absolutely fucking awful) and it is noticeable slower. Not enough to call it "slow" tho, it is pretty snappy
That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems.
Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the user.
I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.
The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to be sitting idle.
> That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems.
If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.)
Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.
> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...
That wouldn't have gained them appreciable new users, but it would have slowed losses. Almost all my browsing is done in Chrome and Brave now. There's not really any reason to use Firefox besides habit now, and I don't, except on my desktop.
Mozilla somehow failed to recognize their entire core userbase was power users and Firefox fans, which relentlessly evangelized the product to other people, going around installing it on grandma's computer.
Then they failed to recognize that while Chrome was a comparable technical product, maybe even slightly better in some ways, the reason for its success it because it was relentlessly shilled by a huge megacorporation that pushed it in advertising, on the world's biggest web properties, and even had it packaged in installers for other products.
Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Chrome by assuming that "if we were just more like Chrome, people would use us", or "we need to make a browser for grandma." Grandma doesn't download browsers. That is, unless a big banner comes up on YouTube telling her she needs to download Chrome for the best experience. By alienating its core "fanbase" or whatever you want to call it, by alienating its power users, Firefox alienated the only demographic it ever had an actual shot with. Unless you count the even-smaller real-open-source-only-we-need-web-freedom demographic.
A common sentiment (which I share) is that Firefox has less and less to distiguish itself from Chrome(ium). Along with compatibility issues (even if they are rare and not Firefox's fault) there is less and less reason to choose it. Being as good as Chrome is not good enough to maintain users when Google is agressively pushing their browser in ways that Mozilla simply can't.
So why would anyone use Firefox over chrome?
Because it is open source? Sure, but so is Chromium. But both seem to have mostly cathedral-style development and someone outside of Mozilla is unlikely to be able to influence the direction of the project in any meaningful way. It's open source software but not an open source project. User feedback is continuously ignored, often with the only argument being developer convenience.
Because of a focus on privacy? While they do like to push that angle in their marketing and in some ways do more to prevent websites from tracking you they show little concern for making the browser itself respect your privacy with opt out telemetry, eperiments, in-browser advertising and more. Again, any user pushback is summarily dismissed.
The only remaining advantage are some niche features here and there. And those are often provided by extension whose API Mozilla limits more and more.
So I still use Firefox but its only because it is the lesser evil, and the differrence is shrinking. I certainly don't trust Mozilla's autoupdates and won't use upstream builds. Thankfully Linux distros still provide a last defense layer - but that we need that layer at all for something that is supposed to be an open browser is ridiculous. I don't fault anyone who says fuck it and just uses Chrome so that ALL sites work out of the box.
I use firefox on Linux for a pragmatic reason actually: it has a better font rendering than Chrom(ium). On my 4K screen I've started to notice that, with all the fixes for it to work right on Wayland, the fonts are still somewhat blurry. I googled and apparently some experts say that Chrome breaks some font rendering rules, on linux. On Windows I guess it isn't an issue since people wound surely notice.
If they focused instead on speed, and somehow managed to keep old plugins compatible, yes.
People moved to Chrome coz it was plainly faster and those who stayed did it for the various plugins they got used to. When new version of FF blows up your workflow might as well go try Chrome. Hell, I'd be using Chrome already if it had sensible vertical tabs implementation... the FF ones after the apocalypse are worse than XUL ones but still better than I've seen on Chrome.
No, but I think they would have if they have continued to develop their own interface iteratively without just blindly copying Chrome. Right now there is for many no reason to pick Firefox over Chrome because they are so similar.
Hard to quantify because you'd have to take account of what actual improvements they might have made instead of spending dev hours on UI, settings and defaults tweaks that mostly served to alienate their core users (IMO).
> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true, but i think its overstated.
To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become the off-brand version of whoever is the market leader. That annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.
The layout I expect Thunderbird to move towards is the one in every mail client I've used in the past decade, I wouldn't call that trendy. At this point you're an outlier so you better have a good reason to stick to the different UI.
That's a good point about gmail, but I was thinking of outlook, apple mail, the gnome mail client, and this one called mimestream that I use now. They all have that same familiar 3 column layout: mailboxes, list of messages, message contents. That layout has been the norm for a while, so I think calling it trendy is a bit of a stretch.
I started using thunderbird half a year ago and like the interface. Sure, there's problems (I haven't encountered a lot of them), but the overall user experience is far better than what I'm used to from other email programs. The only thing that stuck out negatively was when I was searching for an email, in which the way I was wanting to solve it didn't work out as I thought it did. (I was looking for a mail containing specific words from a specific group of senders).
Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure that there will be more new users faster than old users leaving. If it doesn't work out, chances are that they ain't coming back.
I can't say anything about keeping TB open and having it steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail. Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht shouldn't create problems, however.
I've been running Thunderbird in the background without problems the last 15-odd years on whatever computer I had at the time. Still do. No performance problems running 20+ mail accounts with loads and loads of mail. Ofcourse it can be slow if you do things that requires TB to recreate the mail storage but other than that I have no problem opening mail and reading it fast. I'm using both IMAP and POP3 accounts mixed.
I believe there are settings you can run that might create more problems with performance but I haven't touched anything the last 5 years so can't say what it was any more.
I do not think I have touched anything either since I like keeping as much at default as possible, but maybe I have and just do not know it, but it is dog slow for me.
> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
And that risks doing absolute horseshit. Outlook's new UI for example hides the cc/bcc behind an additional click, extremely annoying for anyone but personal mail usage. How MS still haven't managed to discover and fix that with their billions of corporate users is astonishing.
There are a lot of qualifiers there. The linked post by Thunderbird’s Product Design manager spends a lot of time talking about tech debt and feature availability, and not so much about problems with the interface. Indeed, it has a reassuring amount of respect for the current interface, describing a future that "allow[s] veteran users to maintain that familiarity they love".
It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.
I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast, especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me, so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear in multiple folders without affecting performance.
I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...
In fairness, if you're as bad as I am at actually deleting email, you probably had something like 15 years less email accumulation.
I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.
I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.
(Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)
"mark as read" happens automatically whereas archive is an explicit action (pressing "e" on your keyboard after enabling hotkeys or swiping the email on mobile)
This lets you turn the inbox into a sort of TODO list that only shows you stuff that's still pending. Of course you also have to use filters aggressively if you wanna maintain inbox-zero without having to manually archive every "your bank statement is ready" email.
Same situation. A few years ago I started moving old emails into yearly sub folders (just moved all of last years emails into a “2022” folder). This improved performance a lot for me. I’m guessing the smaller folders of emails keep the index files small. Search still works through all of those folders.
> Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.
If they're basically stacked on top of 90% of firefox (which is how I understand it to work), then it's not necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top of a framework that gets bloated.
It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but the performance is really horrific.
Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood? When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.
It's funny you mention that because the experience of trying to connect to Exchange with it is bad enough to cow me into using Outlook after all (of course it doesn't help that calendar support is also shunted off to an extension that never worked that well for me).
Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB.
It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."
But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.
A mail client taking up to 0.2% CPU doing nothing (I assume you're not interacting with it, nor is it trying to download/upload mail or similar), on a "high-end desktop", is itself a little surprising.
I'm watching it now, and it's sitting at 0%. Considering it does poll for emails from time to time (maybe 1x minute) I don't thinks it bad that it ramps up to 0.1% to do so.
Discord, Teams, Firefox, and Slack all seem to use 0-0.1% without much interaction (though I am typing into Firefox right now!) - Thunderbird seems to be 0% more often than not.
> It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."
You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.
Besides the sibling comment by Gare to change the default, you can do this on a per-folder basis by right-clicking, Properties... and checking the box:
"When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder"
I've used it on Linux since 2005 at least, and my only problems were importing a big Outlook .pst and having trouble with its formatting and attachments. It's open daily on my machine, and while it has become more memory hungry, the CPU usage is minimum.
On my Ryzen 7 4800H (8 core) 16GB laptop running Linux Mint, Thunderbird Mail is using 290MB-360MB of RAM. Mostly no registered CPU usage, but when I clicked around a few folders, it went up to about 3% very briefly.
A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere that this speed difference is due to antivirus.
Same. I wouldn't put up with this from any other app. In the last few months it has taken to seizing up for 2-10 seconds at a time in the middle of writing. I've been holding out hope a new release will magically get better. Or that I'll dig deep into what's going on and figure out what the cause is. But switching over to webmail is getting more and more tempting.
I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine?
My issues were:
- no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin
- bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything
- *sometimes* memory usage grows really high
- a bunch of small niggling issues over missing features - for example, I can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook
I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!
Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.
I definitely used Thunderbird for an O365 account that required 2FA and so had to use OAuth, back to.... 2021 at least, I think. Though I think you might have had to know to change the auth method to OAuth to get it working, at least at the time.
If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I used to use the Enigmail plug in which worked okay.
Since its deprecation and Thunderbird's integration of GPG, there were a few hiccups (mostly UI differences between Enigmail and native TB support), but none with key management.
Can achieve feature parity with plain IMAP + TbSync but that's another 3rd party addon.
So "doesn't work out of the box with o365" isn't that big of a stretch, plain TB will only get you IMAP working.
That's honestly more of MS being cancer and not using standards than anything else.
They also introduced required OAUTH2 authentication last year and in a way that you need essentially org admin rights to give any other client than TB access... because you need to create fucking app in MS panels that then gets used by mail client to authorize you. It is entirely aisine platform
I actually just switched to Thunderbird last year because I needed to post a patch to a mailing list and I couldn't find any mail apps for Windows that could do it properly. Previously I used Alpine, but that was a much worse experience because pasting didn't work so I had to clumsily read in a prepared file from disk and not touch any other keys after that for fear of it rewrapping everything. If there are any other mail apps that do this better, and can still connect to "modern" (read: annoying) oauth setups like Office365 etc, I'd definitely be interested in trying them. I don't hate Thunderbird, but to me it seems like the least bad option for supporting both modern top-quote style HTML email and oldskool 7 bit ASCII/triangle bracket quoting/inline patch style email.
But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102).
Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.
This! On my Xubuntu installation(s) the rendering has become so slow to almost be unusable. There were some helpful tips floating around to remedy this situation (turning off webrender seemed to help) but these have stopped working as well.
I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.
I switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use.
Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.
I have multiple mailboxes, which are quite large. Never saw a performance problem at all and I am dumbfounded what could be the issue for people. Its speed and ease of use is why I prefer it to web mail by a large margin. It starts quicker than my browser too.
I guess 'notable' means something like >= 0.01% in this case. But tech debt is an issue if nobody can effectively fork off anything if unhappy with the direction taken.
It's crazy that it's slower than an Electron app! Like most HNers, I fully believe that any JavaScript is slower than native, so how can this be false for this app???
The post said that Thunderbird is an app running on top of Firefox, so it's not much different than an Electron app. There are probably many more layers than a native one. Slowness is too new expected but actually I never felt that Thunderbird is slow. I use it daily.
> ... so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab [and] load Google Mail
Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an already running browser is faster than starting a web browser albatross afresh.
Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes well.
Nope, the issues seem to lie more in just plain bad code. It is seems to be mostly their IMAP code and their mbox code which goes crazy and starts using all CPU, not the UI. The issues happen when opening folders too.
You drastically overestimate the general software consumer.
Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI.
But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"
Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.