Textual words from them:
It’s our first step towards a more modern, more beautiful, and more customizable Thunderbird experience. We think you’re going to love it, and we are endlessly grateful for all of your support throughout the years 💙
Oh no! It looks like an electron app.
Can anyone confirm whether or not it’s built on Electron?
The closest I can find is from Feb 2023, saying that at that time it would not be Electron:
Mozilla also still plans to use the Firefox web browser as the core platform for Thunderbird. That leaves Thunderbird as one of the few cross-platform mail applications that isn’t an Electron app or based on web technologies in some way
So possibly Electron-like but based on Firefox rather than Chromium?
@FistfulOfStars @kr0n @TheWoozy
It’s not an electron app, I installed it.
It’s based on the “Mozilla application framework” [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_application_framework
Is it one though? I’m having a difficult time finding the source code of this new version.
I don’t like the new logo; it looks mean. The previous logo showed a charming bird that delivered my mail, the new one portrays a bird of prey clutching a letter, it will probably bite you if you try to retrieve the letter.
Is this better?
Looks very gnome. Sadly I use KDE so it still looks like a foreign object, just like Firefox. I want native app to look like native apps, is that too much to ask?
is that too much to ask?
Let’s say it’s a lot to ask, especially when the app also needs to be crossplatform and behave functionally the same on all platforms.
Maybe it could be done, in theory, with a lot of work, but it’s definitely not at all an easy task, especially for a project that seemed dead and buried just a few years ago and with just a handful of volunteer devs.
Most crossplatform apps that I can think of don’t really look like native apps in any system. I’m thinking of Chromium, VSCode, Discord, Steam etc.
The only one I can think of right now is Whatsapp, but I’m pretty sure they actually developed three independent apps and maintain all three, for Android, iOS and Windows. They all look and feel like native apps because they are. Please tell me if I’m wrong.
Still, you can’t expect all, or even most developers to do something like that, especially when you start including all the different DEs and themes and so on.
Eh… it’s pretty, I guess, but it’s just too “appified” for power users. My Thunderbird UI is festooned with useful buttons and menus for quick access, and I like the old style of having elements tightly spaced to maximize contextual awareness.
This reeks of form over function. Yuck.
I want to love it but it’s still ugly / dated looking. It’s like the Linux of email clients.
