Thunderbird 3 beta 1 – a platform for innovation shapes up
Today, we’re announcing our first beta-quality release since the Thunderbird project was re-energized about a year ago. It’s exciting to see the first in what will be a series of releases aimed at a broader set of testers make it out the door.
In some ways, this is a typical beta — we’ve changed a lot of code since Thunderbird 2, and we need a lot of people to tell us if we’ve made any boo-boos when fixing bugs. It’s also a good beta in that we’ve moved the product forward, in part thanks to new capabilities in the underlying Mozilla platform, which gives us faster performance all around, an add-on manager which will be even more useful for Thunderbird users than for Firefox users. We also have important new mail-specific capabilities, including a new “autosync” system that gets Thunderbird to download IMAP message bodies early, so they’re already there when you need them, and a much faster implementation for deleting and moving IMAP messages, which I can’t imagine living without at this point. The one-click add-to-addressbook is also an elegant and shameless ripoff of the Firefox bookmarking model, which our alpha users love.
As a result, I feel that even for a first beta, Thunderbird 3 is much better than Thunderbird 2, thanks to a lot of hard work by a motley crew of great contributors worldwide, to whom I’m very grateful. All that and more is described in the release notes, which I encourage beta testers to read.
However, in some other ways it’s far from a typical beta. In particular, unlike the traditional definition of a beta release, we’re definitely not done making feature changes, including some pretty significant feature work that we expect will be integrated in Thunderbird 3 in later beta releases, some features that will live as optional add-ons, and some experiments which may end up in later releases of Thunderbird or not, depending on the result of the experiments.
I’ll talk a bit about some of these upcoming attractions, as I’m quite excited about them (and some more that will have to wait for another post).
First, the autoconfig work, which refers to a complete rethink of the account configuration process in Thunderbird. The account “wizard” in Thunderbird made sense in the early days, but over the years it has acquired complexity and lost relevance, as email systems have gotten more complex. Unfortunately, if you’re lucky enough to have a secure email server, the current Thunderbird user interface unjustly punishes you by making you go through 8 pages of questions and you end up with an account which requires manual tweaks before you can check mail. That’s not good. To deal with this, we have rethought account configuration completely, and came up with a dialog which, when it lands (becomes available by default), should make account configuration really, really easy. It’s been hard to come up with an elegant minimal user interface that hides all of the complexities of email configuration, but it’s worth doing it right.
Next up is tabs. Thunderbird 3 has a great opportunity to be basically coming up with a tabbed interface at a time in history where we’ve learned a lot about how tabs work well or poorly. In Thunderbird 3 beta 1, it’s a fair bit easier to work with tabs than it was in Thunderbird 2 (although many improvements are planned before the final release). For example, it’s much easier to create new kinds of tabs (the calendar Lightning add-on makes great use of those, for example, as I show below). One simple example of this is Bryan Clark’s “glodabook” add-on, which is a starting point for exploring new ways of navigating the address book.
Next up is conversations. Thunderbird’s default mode saves emails you send in a “Sent messages” folder, and emails you receive filed in other folders, typically decided on a per-message basis by the users (more on that below). This is a fine default strategy, but it can make it hard to find related messages if they’re not in the same place (e.g. messages that are replies to emails you sent, or messages that are part of a long conversation, some of which is in your archive folders, and some of which is in your inbox). Thunderbird 3 includes a powerful search engine (“Gloda”) which is designed to let us efficiently find messages that are related, no matter where they are. In particular, it makes it quick to take a message and “show it in a conversation context”. This lets you view the messages you sent interspersed with the messages you received, but also messages from earlier in the conversation which you may have archived. This is still experimental, and not enabled by default in 3.0b1, but early results are very promising:
Next up, search. Part of the Gloda search engine mentioned above is a powerful full-text search engine, which seems to be working quite well so far. Thunderbird search is already better in 3.0b1 than in 2.0 because we’re more aggressively downloading emails, and doing a better job of finding the downloaded copies. With the new search engine, we’ll be able to efficiently do searches like “show me all messages from bryan mentioning ‘conversation’ in the body or the subject”. And we think we can make that easy for users to discover as well:
First we do autocomplete on existing contacts:
and then encapsulate them in graphical objects to simplify the display:
On that topic, one of the design topics we’re exploring is how to make it easier for users to be smarter about search. Thunderbird has always had very powerful search capabilities, but to use them people have to think like database programmers, which most of us aren’t. We have some plans there to help people build smart searches based on starting with the simple searches people are used to from the web, using suggested sub-searches based on analyzing their search results. Now that we have the search engine in place, we can start to experiment with many different search models, and see what works best.
The last two screenshots are particularly exciting to me because they demonstrate that we can leverage the foundational bits of Thunderbird, and experiment with new ways of working with messages, without disrupting the user experience that Thunderbird 2 that many users are comfortable with. What’s equally exciting is that these new ways can themselves be platforms for experimentation, whether by us, or by others. One such experimentation topics is conversation visualization and interaction models. Andrew Sutherland implemented an add-on that shows thread arcs (here using a view that it out of date by a whole week):
Thunderbird has always been an interesting experimental playground, because of its open source nature and the add-on model. The technology platform in Thunderbird 3 will make it even more so — 1) we have better technology that allows new ways to slice the data, 2) as we’re exploring new features through the use of add-ons ourselves, we find out early what changes we need to make to make the platform more extensible, and 3) because we’re fully leveraging web technologies, something which is a bit new for Thunderbird. In particular, all of the views above build on some of the most compelling advances in web technology, from the canvas widget to Javascript toolkit-based animations (JQuery for now) and modern CSS features.
Finally, last but not least, the Lightning calendaring add-on is moving along great. The Thunderbird+Calendar team has made a lot of progress on tackling the stack of issues that made it hard to integrate into the new Thunderbird codebase. We’re not done yet, but it’s looking great:
There are some other add-ons that some contributors are working on that I’ll talk about as they get polished and ready for screenshots.
As always, we love to get ideas for interesting new capabilities we can bring to the platform. We’re focusing on some of the basic capabilities we think are crucial to solving today’s mail problems, such as search and message management, but it’s a huge field, and email users are desperate for innovative ideas.
We’re identifying way more topics of interest than we have time to tackle, so we’re hoping to reach out to designers to get a broader set of participants helping us with some of the design challenges of a modern approach to messaging, within the context of Mozilla Labs. More on that soon.
Whether you’re a designer or an implementor, if you want to build new features on top of the views we’re building, add new kinds of data to add to our database (twitter, facebook, rss, etc.), or new visualizations, do get in touch.
If you’re interested in the extensions above, and aren’t afraid to try out code that changes daily, my recommendation is to use an IMAP server, Shredder (the nightly builds of Thunderbird, which are already different than the beta 1 build), and the extensions at the following locations:
- lightning nightlies (see links at the bottom, and check out the lightning nightly updater)
- exptoolbar (conversation & search results views)
- glodabook (addressbook)
Thanks for your blog post! It’s wonderful to see Thunderbird’s rapid development. I hope we can see these “experimental” add-ons you talked about in the next beta. They are very innovative. – Now, Tb 3 beta 1 only looks like an old Tb 2 with tabs.
How does somebody get involved with helping out?
Shouldn’t you put those extensions on AMO? I guess there is no good way of having beta extensions available to beta users.
[...] david ascher – » Thunderbird 3 beta 1 – a platform for innovation shapes up. [...]
[...] Source: David Ascher [...]
[...] 3.0 beta 1 yesterday. The changeset was too tempting to try it out. You can read more about that on David Ascher’s blog. Conversations and lightening finally make their way in it. Multi tabbed interface is in. It will [...]
Ah, and is there any new progress for Activity? http://clarkbw.net/blog/2008/06/04/activity-is-the-new-download/
This would be a very handy, helpful feature for Tb3.
Great to see such progress! I was just thinking the other day about finding a different e-mail client because I still often have difficulty finding my messages in TB2. Now I’m hoping TB3 might just fix that.
I hope the new search is comprehensive and flexible. I don’t always just want to find e-mails from “Brian” that contain “conversation” somewhere. A LOT of the time I want to find a message from “Brian” OR “Fred” that contain “conversation” in the body or subject, sometime between October 15th and October 30th or November 15th and November 30th. That would be a tremendously powerful search.
Looks good, but I think there are still some usability/UI issues that should be addressed by now:
* I’d like to see a faster way to open a message in a new tab. Currently, you’ll have to right click the message and then select ‘Open Message in New Tab’. One could, for example, use the middle mouse button (the scroll wheel) to open a message in a new tab–similar to what you can currently do in Firefox to open a link in a new tab.
* What about the ‘new message’ window? Supposedly, Thunderbird 3 is going to be the ‘tabbed’ release, so to be consistent with the new UI, one should be able to compose a new e-mail from a new tab; currently, Thunderbird opens in a new window to compose a new e-mail.
* There should be a ‘Tabs’ item on the Thunderbird ‘Options Windows’. This way one could customize the behavior of the new tabbed interfaces. For example, one could define the default action when double clicking on a message: open it in a new window, or in a new tab, or where do you want to compose new messages: in a window, or in a new tab.
Last, but not least:
* Is there going to be a visual refresh, similar to what occurred with Firefofx 3. I’d like to see native icons on Linux, for example.
Keep up the good work!
Juan
David, I know there’s a lot left to be done, but some of the new ideas you’re showing here are making me incredibly excited for the future of Thunderbird.
Keep up the great work and lateral thinking.
I’m sorry to be so blond, but this rocks!
I’m a nightly person, so I follow all that stuff, but these extensions are SO cool!
The only question I can ask (which hasn’t been answered via Bugzilla): Will Thunderbird’s market be geeks, home users and/or business?
You can get a lot of stuff going with extensions and the awesome configs, but I’m just thinking about the regular default package.
Right now, it seems to combine all groups; ie. newsgroups, autoconfig and LDAP.
Looking forward to the next nightly and thank you for a great, spicy blog (even though I was in Barcelona).
[...] you’d like to see the screenshots and more details make sure to check out david ascher’s blog post, or jump right in and download it [...]
Looks awesome, i wanted to try it, but there is no 64-bit build for linux. Any plans to build them for 64-bit ?
Juan, see http://clarkbw.net/blog/2008/12/04/this-bird-can-dance/
It’s already almost done!
Great progress, thanks for the effort, I’m very impressed!
By the way, are you using some TB3-specific theme in the screenshots? Looks cool…
[...] via_ ( ascher.ca) [...]
Great please keep up the good work!
Now that it integrates with search in Vista, I wonder if it’s possible to somehow integrate it with the windows search 4.0 installed on XP?
It should be possible. I think they are basically the same engines.
[...] insieme alla releasenotes. David Ascher, leader di Mozilla Messaging, ha inoltre scritto un post dettagliato in cui descrive molti dei cambiamenti in questa release, insieme a sshots della [...]
Great work done so far guys! Really like the new ‘feeling’ of it all… the only thing i’m worried about is the chance of development being misdirected to creating new features. Stuff like tabbed browsing and IM support may be nice to play with, but I’m for example still missing decent address book support. Sure, it looks better now, but why can’t I save like 4 e-mail addresses for a contact, why can’t I attach a photo to a contact and not easily categorize contacts in groups (like: lists in v2 but without the requirement of the contact to have an e-mail address)…. A lot of things are missing there and I hope those are not being forgotten….
But, overall, keep up the good work
I;m looking forward to the next one!
Great job – I have great expectations for the future of Thunderbird. Don’t release too soon, make it really stable!
This is great! Where can we post feature requests? It would be great if the addon gmailui search operator support could be brought in and supported natively!
http://sites.google.com/site/kmixter/gmailui
[...] Messaging’s David Ascher has some more information as [...]
[...] we share with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 and Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 1. With a small echo effect of the post about the latter by fellow project manager David Ascher, I’m inclined to say that in some ways, this is a typical [...]
Very interesting features and enhancements for this new Thunderbird bata version. What about Peneloppe project? Will it stay as an eudora project or will it be part of Thunderbird 3 as lightning pulg-in seems to be? Thunderbird 3 is not a combination of the best of these 2 products?
So far the changes look amazing.
I have to admit I was thinking of dropping TB for its weakness in conversations, but from what I can tell you’ve come back with a vengeance.
Keep up the good work!
[...] from Mozilla Messaging website, but more detailed information can be found at Mozilla Messaging’s David Ascher’s [...]
[...] Thunderbird 3: http://ascher.ca/blog/2008/12/09/… It’s looking really good. It’s one of my favourite [...]
[...] are some great experimental extensions to take a look [...]
[...] une première bêta, Thunderbird 3 est bien meilleur que Thunderbird 2“, s’enthousiasme sur son blog David Ascher, le responsable de Mozilla Messaging. Et encore, nous n’aurions rien vu : de [...]
[...] Thunderbird 3 beta 1 – a platform for innovation shapes up [...]
Does Thunderbird 3.0 final will include a feature to synchronize e-mail between multiple systems? I would see a tool that could synchronize the e-mail database between the desktop pc and the notebook/netbook…
Thanks in advance!
I’m glad there’s finally been some progress made. I’ve been waiting a long time for a Thunderbird update. I’ve installed it on Mac and generally, the interface improvements over Thunderbird 2 are really good.
Unfortunately, I’ve already run into quite a few bugs that have caused a little migration problems from Thunderbird 2, and some fairly serious UI bugs OS X integration problems, like affecting OS X Spaces and Expose in really weird ways while running the email setup wizard. I’ll file bugs for these issues later when I have time.
Oh, and please can you stop using the old-style OS 9 wait cursor that looks like a wrist watch, and stop using Courier as the default monospace font, at least on Mac. Use something decent like Monaco.
I completely agree with the #9 comment by Juan. I also want to add one really small thing. Thunderbird already has great keyboard shortcuts but it would be nice to have a simple shortcut to not save a message when you attempt to close an open composition. It could possibly work like Photoshop where you simply hit “D” for Don’t Save. Thanks for the great work guys! I have converted everyone I know over to Thunderbird.
[...] muchas cosas mas asi que les dejo el articulo de David Ascher para que vean [...]
Thank you for your hard work and keep going this way!!
I have been using Thunderbird for 7 years so far (before it was even called Thunderbird) and would like to see more attention paid on tweaking existing features and developing new ones.
I would like to suggest you to focus more on the AddressBook part, it could be improved in many ways. First of all Thunderbird should ask for confirmation in deleting existing contacts!!
[...] with servers and mobiles is also in the works. For more tips and integration I suggest to read this post of David Asher, the Mozilla Messaging Chief, he covers many more tweaks and extensions to improve the [...]
[...] Ascher has a great post about our recent Thunderbird 3 Beta 1 release with info on where you can get it and what it [...]
[...] around Mozilla circles, and built a wordle-like visualization of the database-driven queries that I blogged about a couple of days ago. If one can build an add-on to that in a day (well, a night without internet [...]
[...] developing/using Thunderbird’s exciting new prototype message/contact/etc views, it became obvious that performance was not all that it could be. As we all know, the proper way [...]
Great stuff. I’m lovin’ that calendar addon.
Another interesting native feature would be a “minimize to tray” so that we don’t need to have thunderbird standing there in the taskbar.
[...] Messaging to spend some time on interaction testing. Some of the development work going into the exptoolbar is looking interesting, but I would love to see an assessment of how people work with mail, how [...]
David, thanks for an overview. I have a question though, about conversations. I was always configuring Thunderbird (in fact, even Netscape 4 before it) to BCC: me my sent emails instead of burying them in the Sent folder. Then all the conversation are built inside Inbox just by choosing a threaded view. Will the new feature supersede it? Or it will work and look as nicely even with this old technique?
[...] a project with an enormous potential. However, the appearance of Tbird 3 really surprised me, and David Ascher’s blog post on the direction wasn’t something which filled me with a huge amount of confidence. I don’t get some of [...]
[...] pourra trouver sur le blog de David Ascher un article plus complet détaillant l’ensemble des [...]
[...] csak csiripelik a verebek, de várhatóan a következő béták valamelyikében debütál egy újragondolt fiók létrehozó [...]
It’s nice to see that my favorite email client is getting the attention it deserves. I like the new beta so far but, I can’t seem to get glodabook to work. It installs fine but I don’t have the options button in the add-ons pane and I don’t see any changes to the addressbook. What am I doing wrong?
Many congrats! Long live Thunderbird!
Three mostly small suggestions:
1) Under “Favorite Folders”/”Recent Folders”, the inclusion of “Local Folders” is quite distracting, even while I understand you put it there to distinguish it from other root folders. It’d be great though if you could have an option to avoid showing that, even if it meant there could be duplicate names.
2) Under the message preview, the “hide details” option (when clicked), seems it could still hold the “other actions” dialog without taking up more space. For those of us using a laptop with a small screen, it is nice to have things fit in a condensed space, but still have access to buttons/features.
3) Under draft view, it’d be great for there to be an option to edit inline (ideally with a key command)–without opening a new window. Every step counts, especially when you want to jot down ideas quickly.
Hey, is someone gonna get the keyconfig extension to work on the new thunderbird? can’t live w/o my keyconfig. Speaking of which, how come keyconfig was never added to addons.mozilla.org? u have to search through the mozilla forums to find the link to it.
anyway the new thunderbird’s looking awesome!
tabs don’t work as one would expect.
namely, if you open tabs for each account you have, one would expect that one could have the account/folder tree opened for each account in individual tabs and the rest closed.
but it doesn’t work that way, any change to the open/close nature of the tree in one tab is reflected in all other tabs.
Using TB3.0b1 (italian language), glodabook not function. Any idea?