Thunderbird and Firefox Replacement?

blackhaz

blackhaz

Are there any alternatives to Firefox and Thunderbird? Did pkg upgrade and ended up with the new versions with updated UI. I can't f#@%ing stand them. Literally the worst UI redesign since the history of personal computing. Are people jumping the ship, and if so, where do we go?
 
Gnome Web [aka Epiphany] and Evolution.

I had been using Web for years without any problems then suddenly a few months ago it wouldn't work with youtube or github so I switched to Firefox.

I just checked it out again and whatever was wrong seems to be fixed.
I also use Evolution, it just seems more put together and less adhoc than Thunderbird, no other reason.
 
ClawsMail looks interesting, thanks for the suggestions. I've managed to hack Thunderbird a little closer to the old UI look with some custom userChrome.css, but will definitely explore ClawsMail at the next opportunity. SeaMonkey does not appear to be in the FreeBSD repository anymore. Minimal browsers are great, but would prefer something with a normal GUI. Chrome is obvious choice, but trying to avoid anything from Google as much as I can, although with the way Mozilla is heading maybe that's going to be a viable choice soon. Alas... It appears that UI kids with zero real design experience are taking over the industry and killing perfectly fine things.
 
I do not want to user a GUI program from reading Email.

Unfortunately there are few CLI programs usable due to today's requisites (html mail, xoauth2, etc).

There is a field for developing new software ...
 
I long for the days when email was just plain text, anything else was an attachment.
I've used mutt and alpine in the past, but inbound mail got too "fancy".
 
Here we go. Everything is a sodding phone:
Having multiple level of indentation will make that view pretty ugly to use and useless in smaller screens...
Click to expand...

Betterbird restores the threaded view, but is still based on the "Supernova" nonsense. I've seen this moment coming for a long time, but I'm still sad about giving up on Thunderbird after more than two decades.
 
mer said:
I long for the days when email was just plain text, anything else was an attachment.
I've used mutt and alpine in the past, but inbound mail got too "fancy".
Click to expand...

I still use alpine, it has better imap support than mutt.

Reading html mail with alpine has an advantage: it does not automatically open the links with images.

Such links confirm the sender that you opened the mail.

cracauer@ said:
I find that HTML-only mail are usually not worth reading anyway, especially if they don't display clearly in lynx.
Click to expand...

It is like WWW, we cannot decide about the structure of the mails sent to us, and unfortunately important
mails are sent as html mail.
 
With mutt, (and neomutt), you can read html mail if you must--sadly, these days, some essential mail, say, from doctors or whatever, may only be readable as html. Jason Ryan, from ArchLinux, did a good write up on it. He uses vimprobable, (don't even know if that's around in pkgs) but you can do it just as easily with firefox. http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2012/05/12/mutt/

The article's from 2012, but I suspect many of us agree with him about html mail.
 
Jose said:
Betterbird restores the threaded view, but is still based on the "Supernova" nonsense. I've seen this moment coming for a long time, but I'm still sad about giving up on Thunderbird after more than two decades.
Click to expand...
Very sad indeed. I've been using Thunderbird for more than a decade. Receiving about 100-200 e-mails per day. Have gigabytes of archives, everything was working perfectly - very few bugs, pretty fast, it was a Swiss watch. The interface was fine. Dated, yes, but it worked, and wasn't interfering with the workflow. There were absolutely zero reasons for them to do all that Supernova stuff. I wonder if they're trying to make the whole thing into some HTML/CSS abomination to run it "in the cloud" or in the browser. Meaning there is a chance Thunderbird has little future as a stand-alone app, unless they change course again.

Firefox has also turned into heavily padded collection of flat, round-cornered crap and overloaded burger menus. I've used it since Phoenix 0.1. I remember it splitting from the Mozilla code and it was like a breath of fresh air. They've cut all the bloat out of Mozilla which could barely start on good hardware, to make a great browser. Then Mozilla was back at it - took Phoenix (now Firefox) and made a fucking multicooker out of it, with calendars, managers, theming and all that bullshit.
 
hruodr said:
Reading html mail with alpine has an advantage: it does not automatically open the links with images.
Click to expand...
Thanks for this, I may have to revisit.

First thing I've done with all email clients is:
set default to "text"
set "do not automatically open links"
set "do not automatically download attachments"

ClawsMail has a nice set of filtering and easily lets you view the message source (headers and body). Couple both and it's easy to create rules to delete spam that is not caught elsewhere.
 
mer said:
set "do not automatically download attachments"
Click to expand...

And here is the advantage of alpine over mutt.

In alpine you can read the body without downloading the attachments,
you download attachments you want after reading the body.

Mutt downloads all or nothing.

And I am using alpine with gmail, it is supporting xoauth2.

It has some support for encryption.
 
Just tried Dooble. Pages are loading very slowly, like 2-5 times slower than Firefox or Chrome, and the UI is really laggy for some reason. (I'm on 12th Gen i7.)
 
Here's how my Thunderbird looks like after some userchrome.css and theme tinkering. Closer to the old pre-Supernova look. I have also attached the CSS file and theme XPI theme file I've made in case this might be of help to somebody.

1702590134839.png
 

Attachments

bob2112 said:
I haven't used Thunderbird for years, but I'm curious as to how Firefox can be ruined by a UI redesign - surely it's just a box with a web page in it.
Click to expand...
You know how some operations pop up a dialog "Are you sure you want to...." then there are two buttons, Yes and No? Imagine you've used this software for a long time, the Yes button was always on the right, but the latest update flipped them and now the No is on the right?
A minor annoyance, but why? Because some hotshot just out of college with a design degree says "It's better".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top