[OT] Thunderbird 3 vs. 2

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:39:42 -0600, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:

> "Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message
> news:hndpev$2oma$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> That sort of thing is a big pet peeve for me too (Maybe I'm just being
> pessemistic, but it seems to be all too common lately). It's definitely a
> dominant charactaristic of Mozilla in general though, not just  
> Thunderbird.
> Literally at least half the time I use FireFox, there will be some point
> where I'll have something loading in one tab, so I'll try to switch to
> another tab so I can do something useful while I'm waiting, but then it
> won't switch tabs (or have any responsiveness at all, for that matter)  
> until
> the first tab finishes loading. *Then* it'll switch tabs even though by  
> then
> it's become pointless.

To add insult to injury, when you send an email using Thunderbird on  
Ubuntu, while the email is being sent, there are two windows in your face  
that you don't care about: the message you just wrote, and the  
"Sending..." window on top of it. Of course you'd want to move on with  
your life instead of watching your message being packaged and sent, but  
that's difficult with Thunderbird. So what you need to do is Alt-Tab twice  
and you can return to Thunderbird's main window and continue reading your  
email.

I read and write so much email everyday, for me the process of reading,  
replying, and archiving email must be entirely streamlined. For archiving  
I found the Nostalgy extension; I press Shift-A and the message goes to an  
archiving folder. I need to synchronously wait for the message to go away,  
but I can put up with that. I couldn't find a good extension "minimize the  
useless windows while sending". Even worse, I tried to make the point on a  
Thunderbird forum and a thundermoron brushed that off as a non-issue and  
suggested the Alt-Tab solution.

Anyhow, this version 3 takes serious steps towards making the streamlining  
of the read/reply/archive process more difficult. But then this is the  
second message I'm writing using Opera, and I was glad to see that the  
first one disappeared off the screen as soon as I pressed Ctrl-Enter.


Andrei