OT Thunderbird

[Another Dave]

I've used the original Mozilla suite, Seamonkey and Firefox & Thunderbird seemingly forever. I simply cannot get on with the recent "enhancements" to Thunderbird.

Today I finally bit the bullet and reverted to the 4 year old version 2.

Bliss!

No tabs. No 5 line headers needing the Compactheader add-on. No double spacing all over the place requiring a special theme. No random opening of new windows all the time (never found a cure for this).

And it's FAST.

Why don't they leave things alone?

Another Dave

[John Williamson]

'Cos they got bored supporting it?

Or because some of the security flaws that have been found can't be fixed without a total re-write?

[Hugh - Was Invisible]

After years of using Mozilla stuff but late last year:

I had problems with Thunderbird using it with Eternal September (now moved to opera for NGs and RSS)

I had problems with Firefox needing to try and load many pages more than once. (Now using Chrome)

[The Natural Philosopher]

ahh.. that's still the default 'icedove' here..(Debian Lenny)

As you say, when running well, leave well alone..

I recently 'upgraded' to Firefox 9 and its broken half my usual websites..they are not intending to fix it before version 10..

Meanwhile I am using Ie6 in a virtual machine that I have for 'making sure web sites will work with IE6'

Because as I discovered many years ago successful engineers destroy the jobs they just had..

..come 1983 there really wasn't anything left to do in analogue electronics that a competent technician couldn't do except in RF and I was bored with that, or chip design, but that meant moving to the far east or California..

[Brian Gaff]

I have no idea, but its a pain in the neck. In a way it makes many go and download windows live mail, which is simple effective and seems to work on most versions of windows and needs no extras. its enough like this Outlook Express to make conversion to it easy for those used to Microsoft stuff. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

But security issues do not deman a complete rewrite of the way it works only of the code with the holes. Brian

[John Williamson]

Sometimes it gets to the point where the attempts to block the holes mean that the code and documentation are so tangled that a re-write is the easiest and most sensible option.

You're right, though, the user interface could have remained consistent to itself, except for the way that there was pressure to make it consistent across the whole Mozilla platform. Ghods know why, though.

[Paul - xxx]

Heh, I'm never satisfied (not what the wife says, mind) and keep swapping things .. but I always come back to Firefox for t'internet, Xananews for usenet and MS Outlook for emails.

To save googling (I'm lazy) what's Sea Monkey and why should I use it?

[Paul - xxx]

Bad form, I know, but wth .. Just downloaded it to try. I've never heard of this before, dunno why!

[Tim Streater]

Quite right. The same can happen when features are added especially if the additions are bodges.

[John Rumm]

[John Rumm]

Its the successor to the original mozilla suit that included browser, email/news, web authoring and various other bits all in the one integrated package.