[OT] Thunderbird 3 vs. 2

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:op.u9gum0r0c5uhrj at leptoc...
> 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.
>

Wow. You know, a lot of people consider Outlook Express the red-headed 
stepchild of email/ng clients (largely because of the security problems that 
were fixed ages ago). But I use it every day and it doesn't have *anything* 
like that.

The closest annoyance I have to that is if you try to send a message or pull 
emails from a specific email account when it just happens to be in the 
middle of its scheduled "receive all" cycle, then it doesn't give any 
priority to your request. Mildly anoying sometimes...but at least I don't 
have to watch it try to send.

> 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.
>

That kind of thing is 100% typical for the Mozilla scene. When FF3 came out, 
I requested options to disable the new AwfulBar (instead of having to rely 
on some add-on hack) and replace the unified back/forward buttons (used that 
a lot with IE7, and the more I did, the more I hated it) with the old 
separate style (instead of using an add-on that, last I checked, didn't even 
exist). Well...all I got back was a bunch of rather nasty bitching about 
"How dare I even think of not absolutely loving the new changes. Lots of 
people are perfectly fine with it, so obviously I have no good reason to 
want it the old way". Arrogant bastards. With attitudes like that I think 
it's an absolute shame that they have as much of a following as they do.