[OT] Thunderbird 3 vs. 2

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 03/11/2010 05:14 AM, Denis Koroskin wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:53:33 +0300, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>
>> The kick-off meeting for Thunderbird 3:
>>
>> "Thunderbird 2 is quite sluggish, has poor asynchronous execution of
>> tasks, poor focus control, and annoying modal dialogs on error. What
>> do we do for version 3?"
>>
>> "Let's build on all that! We'll make Thunderbird 3 even more sluggish
>> even on the best of machines. Let them wait for second with an old
>> screen whenever they click on something."
>>
>> "Excellent! While we're at it, let's make the selection colors such
>> that the user never knows where the focus is. That, combined with the
>> slugishness of the UI, will go a great job at confusing people."
>>
>> "And how about this - let's even insert large delays at random while
>> the user is typing an email. There's nothing better than typing out of
>> sync with the screen!"
>>
>> "Awesome! To make the deal sweeter, we'll replace the useful filter
>> functionality with a full-blown search. That would require us to index
>> all emails in the background thus making things even slower, and will
>> confuse the heck out of everyone."
>>
>> "Go Thunderbird 3!"
>>
>>
>> Sigh.
>>
>> Andrei
>
> If would recommend using Opera. If not as a default Web-browser, at
> least as a Mail-agent.
> http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/7317/picture1qf.png

Thanks, Denis. I'm looking at Opera now and will give it a try. 
Unfortunately it shares a number of issues with Thunderbird, among which 
out-of-sync display:

http://erdani.com/opera-out-of-sync.jpg

The message displayed in the message pane is unrelated to the one 
clicked in the list above. I'm not talking milliseconds here; I'm 
talking a dozen seconds. The headers were loading, and the out-of-sync 
period could be arbitrarily long. To me that's a crass error.

It is technically very easy to put a nice progress display up as soon as 
the selection is changed so as to keep the user in the know about what's 
going on. But it takes a Steve Jobs to actually understand the 
importance of UI and to make sure it gets done right. The man is worth 
every penny.


Andrei