[elorant]

Apart from the UI which is crap since their last major update. There are menu options everywhere, two ribbons on the top, a hamburger menu on the right and another on the left. For a long time you opened Thunderbird and it didn't default on the last message that you received but somewhere in the middle of the heap.

[mzajc]

> Apart from the UI which is crap since their last major update

But when they updated the UI, they

- Added options to use to make it very close to the old layout

- Set those options for you if you had it customized like that in the previous version

Which is IMHO much better than how Mozilla handled the redesign - you can get the old style in a GitHub repo thanklessly maintained by one person[0], enable userchrome support in about:config (until they decide to take it away one day!), and enable compact mode (also gated behind about:config and called "Compact (not supported)". Oh, and remember to update the userchrome every few updates because they keep breaking it.

That's the difference between user-centric and not user-centric.

[0]: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

[celsoazevedo]

It's hard to be in charge of a project like this. You're criticized no matter what you do.

The old UI was criticized by some for being outdated, a mix of old and new styles, didn't fit well with new OS/app styles, etc. It was crap. So they update the UI and it's still crap... for other users. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

[blibble]

the people still using a fat client are likely doing it because they don't like change

edit: I say this MYSELF as a thunderbird user!

I don't want an "new experience" every 9 months, and having to explain it to my parents

[dubya]

Both outlook.office.com and mail.google.com use much more memory and CPU than any "fat" client, and are constantly changing little things about the UI. Safari now often closes outlook automatically on an M5 Mac because it's using significant amounts of energy.

[WD-42]

Or people that simply have more than one email account?

[brendoelfrendo]

And I use a fat client because I like having all of my email addresses aggregate to one place, and I like it when that software gives me a modern look and feel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[hagbard_c]

All your mail in one place does not require a 'fat' client, something like Claws mail [1] (not in any way related to the recent LLM claws craze) can handle it without problems. Modern looks, well... it looks the way it looked about 25 years ago give or take a few iterations of GTK. Compact, efficient, to the point. If that's not your thing and you'd rather have large amounts of empty space and unrecognisable buttons it can be skinned to look 'modern'. In my startup sequence I launch 4 communications tools on one screen: gajim, telegram-desktop, signal-desktop and claws-mail in that order. Even though Claws gets launched last it appears first on screen because it is lightweight while the other three are anything but - Telegram is a native QT application, gajim is Python (nothing more needs to be said) and signal-desktop is Electron (even less needs to be said).

[1] https://www.claws-mail.org/

[ginko]

As a longterm thunderbird user I find this annoying. I appreciate it being maintained more actively again but I really liked the fact that the UI stayed stable for years. Changing things to make them "more modern" is just annoying. No one asked for this.

[samtheDamned]

I was asking for it :/ (see: wishing vainly while project development appeared to be petering out)

[duskdozer]

Agreed, so tired of the endless treadmill of 'modernizing' UI

[crossroadsguy]

When you delete a message after that the old message remains selected and so if you hit delete again thinking the last time didn’t do the trick, you deleted another message and now go to deleted messages and try to find what you deleted.

The app has a phantom message even in empty folders that it keeps selected. Unread bubble and nothing else, an empty message. You can’t even delete it. Sometimes it persists between app restarts.

It shows unread count on a folder just because it feels like it.

It’s a long list.