[OT] Thunderbird 3 vs. 2

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:17:36 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 03/12/2010 06:55 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:13:13 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Give a little break here, you are loading almost 500,000 headers :) I
>> use opera for newsgroups, and day-to-day use is pretty good. Yes, the
>> first time you set it up, if you ask it to download all headers (which I
>> did because I want to be able to search on old articles), then it takes
>> a bit. In other words, when you are downloading a day's or even a week's
>> worth of messages, the sync problem is not noticable.
>
> There is only one level of tolerance for that kind of major goofiness,  
> and that is zero. The screenshot I sent was not taken while Thunderbird  
> is blocked - you can still change the selection in the list or the tree.  
> The only problem is that the message pane does not change for a long  
> time.
>
> The flow on selection change is very simple:
>
> 1. Display "wait" cue in the message pane.
>
> 2. Fetch the message immediately with top priority.
>
> 3. Display the message in the message pane.
>
> Step 2 is another huge reason of annoyance with both Thunderbird and  
> Opera. As far as I can tell, if they are downloading headers in the  
> background, user actions have bottom  priority. I want to see a message,  
> I click, and then I wait and wait and wait. It's like a worker who can't  
> tend to an urgent task because of doing drawer cleanup! The right  
> behavior is to pause everything that's going on if that would slow down  
> the user.
>
> The fact that the responsiveness of the interface is so dependent on the  
> connection activity is only one extra _fault_ of the engineers, not a  
> reason to cut them some slack.

Sure, but What I'm telling you is, you are talking about an unusual  
circumstance, one that you should not encounter every day.  I agree it  
could be done better, but at least for me, I can tolerate an initial  
annoyance if the product works fine afterwards.  It's like the D download  
requiring me to chmod the binaries.  Annoying once, could be better, but  
does not really get in the way of day-to-day activities.

>> One thing it does do which I think could be better is as it downloads
>> messages, it threads them individually. This probably explains why it
>> takes so long to download all the headers. I suppose it does this so you
>> can read messages as others are downloading, but obviously this is not
>> possible ;)
>>
>> I chose opera over thunderbird because, well, I can't remember why, but
>> I think it had something to do with being able to download all the
>> messages. Or maybe it threads them better. One command to memorize is
>> the 'g' key, which marks the current message as read and goes to the
>> next unread message.
>
> Thanks, that's a useful shortcut.
>
> As far as I can tell, however, I'm unable to use Opera for news.  
> Yesterday I exited Opera before having downloaded all headers. Today I  
> started it and it seems to be in an infinite loop. The status bar says  
> "Connecting", then "Authenticating", then "Fetching Groups". It has done  
> so for ten minutes and is not making any progress in terms of loading  
> headers.

That seems sucky.  I haven't tried that, but I'll remember not to...

I have managed to get opera hung in a similar state, but usually a restart  
fixes it.  It's certainly not perfect software.  But it's better than  
everything else I've tried for newsgroups anyways.  If you find something  
better, please share.

> Oh, and yesterday I crashed Opera twice. Even Thunderbird does not have  
> such instabilities.
>
> Update: as I finished this post, the toolbar stopped oscillating and  
> Opera went in a quiescent state. According to it, the last message was  
> sent on 04/26/2004. Changing the selected newsgroup makes it start  
> oscillating again, and again without making any progress.

You put opera in a weird state.  This can be true of any software.  Even  
your precious Apple made such shit happen with iTunes once on my  
computer.  An upgrade (triggered by their popup-based downloader)  
completely disabled iTunes from starting (couldn't load some library) and  
only after removing all apple-related software, rebooting, and  
reinstalling did it work.  We as software developers should tolerate bugs  
in programs much better than others, being understanding of how hard it is  
to get software right, but for some reason, the exact opposite seems to  
happen.

> This is the stone age of software.

It's a shame people can't write bug-free software these days, I agree... ;)

One thing this does point out -- the first experience with software is the  
most important.  People have no tolerance for bugs in the first usage.

-Steve