[OT] Thunderbird 3 vs. 2

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 03/12/2010 11:04 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 03/12/2010 10:36 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Good point, and I'm glad that there's work being done on dmd installers
> for Windows and Linux.
>
> In the end I managed to get out of the wrong state. I don't know how.
> Later on (after a couple of restarts), I got into a state where I could
> see a recent message header, but nothing in the display pane. So I
> changed the selection and saw some quite hilarious message:
>
> http://erdani.com/opera-many-new-messages.jpg
>
>
> Andrei

NEWSFLASH

I swear that right after I sent the message above, I clicked "OK" to 
download "ALL" those 3 messages and the next thing I saw was this (I 
wish I was kidding):

http://erdani.com/opera-crash.jpg

It's not impossible the code that handles the "All" download assumes the 
actual number of messages is greater than 250...


Andrei