Destructive Feedback
(New) Outlook pushed me beyond my limit. I installed Thunderbird. My impressions and implicit requests follow. I shall neither gush nor herd precious cats, because I loathe cats.
Predictably, as with most FOSS efforts, the fundamentals seem solid, technically elegant, and intuitively work as expected. Some consistency with Firefox offers welcome familiarity. There's a prevailing attitude behind this. The same attitude is behind my gripes. A kind of (FOSSy or Apple-esque) superiority that ironically resolves itself into luddism. Yes, it might be better. But the world does not revolve around you. Lamentably, it revolves around Microsoft. And that will never change without devoting attention to persuasion.
That means making it look and feel nice. Thunderbird is lacking in both, sometimes badly.
FONTS.
There are several posts and people whinging on this topic.
My take. Inability to control the recipient's rendering is no defence of assumed rightness.
I have spent hours setting the available config (General and Composition) parameters and sending emails to myself and reading them. All on the same device running Win10.
a) When I view them in webmail, they look just about OK but the font's a bit smaller.
b) When I view them in Outlook, they look just about OK but the font's a bit bigger.
--> When I view them in Thunderbird, font and size barely resemble either of the above.
--> When I compose them in Thunderbird, likewise. Ever heard of WYSIWYG? It matters.
There should be no differences between what I see when I compose an email in Thunderbird, and what I see when I read that received email in Thunderbird, webmail, and Outlook. Same font, colours, and size (give or take scaling).
READ/ COMPOSE.
--> Why do I have various options allowing an email to be read in situ (reading pane) yet when I want to compose an email, I have to do it in a new window? Quaint. Inconsistent. And ugly.
--> When I want to open an email to read, why must I double-click on it? Neither Outlook nor webmail behave like this anymore. One click (or tap) and the email is displayed.
There should be configuration options to provide the above single-click opening and in-situ composition behaviour.
DARK MODE.
It's the new black. And only in Thunderbird does it change my coloured text to white for rendering on a dark background. Someone couldn't be bothered to do it right. This is just plain lazy.
Effort should be committed, however painstaking and boohoo boring, to make Thunderbird's dark mode look beautiful and of equal sophistication to Outlook.
Microsoft and others have dug half their graves with recent strategic f-ups. With a little effort, FOSS can finish what they began. There has never been a greater appetite. But it will pass once people acquiesce to the enshittification. There is a moral argument for devoting attention to these matters. Make it look and feel nice, and painless to use.
Please, stop fellating around with "Account hub" and pay attention to the small things. The inability to set the colour of the "Sent" icon. The vertical chasm between folders. The superfluous but enormous "Search" box colonising the top of the screen. The shambolic counter-intuitive low-lighting of what's clicked upon and thus highlighting of what's just lost focus. The aesthetics are just naff. With a little attention to detail, Thunderbird could steal so many who are ready to dump Microsoft in a dumpster and sit on the lid.
NB. the solutions required to fix some or all of the above cannot be delivered solely in CSS because CSS cannot do logical processing.
