(no subject)

[arethinn]

Has anyone tried Thunderbird 5? Good, bad, ugly? I'm kind of annoyed that there's a new version out. Not that I haven't been on TB 3 for a while, but on my home desktop installation, while I had to patch some of its annoying quirks with extensions, the fact that it's the product of repeated upgrades on an ongoing installation mean that it's still got the old-style single-inbox folder structure, so I have not had to deal much (only a little on my laptop, which I don't use much) with the main thing I hate about TB 3: the insistence on giving every account you set up its own inbox and folder tree. (No, "Unified" folders does not solve this in the way I want it to be solved.) It's only since having to deal every day with the fresh install on my new work desktop that I've been having to cope with that for the past month, and I've only just gotten a bit settled with the best workarounds I can figure out and resigned myself to the tray icon for new email being all but useless (has to do with inbox focus; details are outside the scope of this post). Suffice it to say I am loath to have to start coping with an entirely new set of annoyances already.


P.S. Dunno that I'm keen on Firefox 5 either. I was still waiting for my can't-live-without extension to get upgraded to work with Firefox 4 (no, this isn't one that disabling compatibility checking can solve; it really honestly doesn't function) so that I could bite that bullet and look for skins that would make it look like 3.x again because dammit if I wanted to use Chrome I'd use Chrome, and now here they want me to use version 5?

Comments

[charcoalfeathers]

All I use Thunderbird for for these days is reading RSS feeds, but I'm regretting that too, lately. It wants to ask for my passwords on my feeds (all 100 or so of them) periodically, and sometimes it just doesn't update for a while. I'm about to write my own glue to bring the same functionality to any mail app (RSS-to-mail gateway), so I'm skipping the new update entirely.

I'm pretty update-numb at this point. It seems like Firebox and Thunderbird both want to update at least once a week these days, and it's so persistent about telling you to install updates... I get so tired of seeing it that I just skip them for a while. That, coming from someone who's spent enough time in IT to know better.

[arethinn]

I don't mind pushing the decimal updates that way, especially sub-decimal (? whatever you call the .x part of a version number like 3.6.x) ones that are security fixes and the like. Once a week is how often Microsoft pushes Windows updates, after all. But I don't see why they are pushign to get major version numbers out so fast. Husband speculates they may be trying to do like Google and make every revision a whole number (ugh, why). At least they give the option not to do updates silently without user interaction - that really annoys me about Chrome, for some reason.

[digitalsidhe]

I seem to still be using Thunderbird 3.1.11. Maybe I should at least upgrade to version 4?

I agree with you about being annoyed by the Firefox "we're coming out with a new major version number every 6 months!" decision. This is going to play merry hell with my employer's "supported browsers" list; we only even reconsider that list once every year, IIRC, and making actual changes in it tends to be even less frequent. (Obviously, we're going to have to change that process and timeline... but that's easier said than done at a corporation of my employer's size.)

[arethinn]

I seem to still be using Thunderbird 3.1.11. Maybe I should at least upgrade to version 4?

I thought they skipped 4 so that TB 5 will align with Fx 5 which is supposed to come out soon?

[digitalsidhe]

Oh, did they? I didn't know.

Well, Firefox 5 is out already; I've been using it for a couple of weeks.

[arethinn]

Googling for "Thunderbird 4" doesn't turn anything up, no. And if Fx 5 is already out (jaysus!), then that clinches it.

[digitalsidhe]

Yeah, I was pretty annoyed when Firefox 5 came out something like a week or so after I'd finally upgraded from 3 to 4. But the 4->5 upgrade was pretty painless.

I'm not about to switch to Chrome, because there are far too many things Firefox allows me to customize that Chrome won't. Even just simple things like the find text within a page as you type feature: In Firefox, it will automatically search in links only as I type, or I can type a slash to start searching all the page text. This is flexible, convenient, and powerful.

To the best of my knowledge, Chrome won't let me have that behavior. In fact, I can't see any option anywhere in Chrome's fairly minimal "Options" screen to tweak find-in-page behavior at all.

And that's just a single example; there are literally dozens of things I've customized about Firefox, and those are all behaviors that I just casually assume will be available to me all the time.

[arethinn]

there are literally dozens of things I've customized about Firefox, and those are all behaviors that I just casually assume will be available to me all the time.

Yeah, me too. It annoys me when I use anyone else's install of Firefox, even (even my husband's: most often, the fact that he doesn't put a Closed Tabs List entry in the context menu, instead using Ctrl+F11, or F12, is it? to invoke "reopen last tab"... but then how do I get to that tab that was, oh, four tab closures back?), never mind being forced to use other browsers.

eta: In fact, both Tb and Fx are so customized for me that I have to maintain a text file of exactly what all the customizations are so that I can recreate the environment the way I want it when I have to install fresh. Otherwise I can't remember them exactly and wind up being frustrated for a while going "but why isn't this working the way it used to?"

[elven-ranger.livejournal.com]

Lol when you said Thunderbird 5, I thought of the cartooon series, lols