I understand that search bar position is not changeable by theming, it's a Thunderbird team's decision, but it irks me to see it take up so much premium space.
It was the same with browsers, it took many years and iterations to get where we are now (tabs on top, no wasted space) and I think those lessons should be carried over.
Tabs at the top is wasted space, I much prefer my tabs on the side instead, as most web content is taller than it is wide, and I have a widescreen monitor. I understand the choice of tabs on top when 640x480 was the most common resolution, but for desktop usage today? Tabs on top seems like an outdated layout choice.
I generally have the same hatred but oddly on Mac OS I prefer the Dock on the right side. I've been dual Win/Mac user and have had this preference on Mac for a long time. Not sure why as it goes against almost everything else I do LOL
I had my Mac dock on the side for a while, but I’m back to bottom dock as I work with two external monitors and just leave the dock on the laptop display. I also had the taskbar on the left of my Win2k setup for quite some time but these days I hardly use windows outside of gaming so it just stays where it is by default
Yeah this. What should irk about search bar is cannot be moved. The static nature of UI these days stinks when back in the day we aimed for more composable user facing apps. Mod games by dumping a model file in a dir; boomed recomposed the experience.
Now it’s all micro transactions so an MBA doesn’t have to work anymore.
Now those are power user and dev tools and users get what they decided was the just right info dense or sparse design.
I still fall a slight bit in love when an application has a “Customize…” option attached to the menu/ribbon/whatever. I had Word set up just the way I wanted it some 20 years ago
There are browser - Vivaldi for example - that allow you to place the tab strip on any edge you want. To me personally it just looks and feels wrong, maybe just because of years of exposure to tabs on the top, but I can not get used to it, even though I have to admit that the tab labels are much nicer to read on the left if you have sufficiently many tabs open.
Not only does Vivaldi allow you to do that, but you can customise every menu in the program. I've modified the context menu to have exactly the things I want, in the order I want them. This is what Firefox should have been.
It's too bad I'll have to dump Vivaldi soon, now that Google is killing adblockers.
I’ve been daily driving Arc for a while now and I’m very sold on the tabs on the left. I think it’s the mix of smart folders, pinned pages, and knowing that stale tabs will be automatically closed so it doesn’t ever feel too cluttered. Also the quick show/hide with Cmd+s is perfect, especially since it’s been quite a while since I’ve wanted to Save a webpage.
Side note: it infuriates me that Microsoft’s web-Office will “helpfully” remind me that it auto saves when I do Cmd+s but also captures the event so that Arc can’t handle it. Which reminds me…I can probably whip up a quick Boost to get rid of that - yay rubber ducking in the comments!
I've always been sad "tabs + browser bar + title bar" (i.e. in a single row) at the top never seems to stick around as an option. On larger monitors this results in a near perfect utilization of space while still being able to have reasonably wide tab titles.
Vivaldi & Floorp offer this through being highly customizable but they tend to have cracks around the edges of their use for the same reason.
I was first introduced to this with a Chrome flag back in 2011 https://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-new-compact-navigation-f... but they ended up backing out for various reasons (the largest of which was probably the specific design used a pop-down url bar which went over the page area, so could be spoofed).
In 2021 Safari became the largest browser I've seen roll this out as a 1st party feature to general users, but it faced some backlash https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-get-more-space-in-safar... I'm not a big fan of their particular styling choices but the layout was pretty decent.
This is a popular argument, just one small problem with it: the 4:3 displays of old (640×480 et al) were also "wide" rather than "tall". So by this logic, there would have never been a time where horizontal tabs (or indeed, a horizontal taskbar) would have "made sense".
So I think it's reasonably easy to see that this is not and was never the actual driver behind this decision. It's completely retconned.
The driver was that unless you have a large number of tabs, vertical tabs waste more space than horizontal tabs, due to the width of the tabs column for vertical tabs vs. the height of the tabs row for horizontal tabs. Like in this [0] random example with just single tabs, there is a lot more wasted space on the left and right (below “My Notebook” and “Phonetics”) than on the top (to the right of “New Section 1”). If we used a vertical writing system instead of a horizontal one, we’d have had vertical tabs from the start.
Widescreen monitors afford that wasting of space better.
Well, 4:3 is less wide than 16:9 or 16:10 or whatever else we're doing these days.
But, I do agree that this was likely never the driver. In fact, I've always thought the "obvious" explanation is simply that window controls and title bars are at the top, and since tabs are like nested windows inside a window, they would follow basically the same patterns...
Horizontal space is still a premium regardless of monitor size when designing/building for responsive viewports. Vertical space is almost zero cost in terms of design constraints.
Even on large monitors you'd be surprised the number of people at 150% zoom with small windows opened instead of fullscreen.
Putting often used controls (tabs, docs, menus, etc) across the long side has a solid argument going for it too, though: your mouse pointer is almost always closer to one of the long sides.
Also, if vertical screen estate is a concern, just turn your monitor 90°
A lot of professionals working with paper sized documents (legal, bookkeeping, administration) do this.
As a software engineer, I've tried it, but I prefer splitting windows (tiling, or panes or such) horizontally. So my estate is limited in width more than in height.
Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't). My (multiple) browser windows on my very big wide screen are all roughly in 4:3 ~square shape and top tabs make a lot more sense.
And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.
Every once in a while I wouldn't mind for a specific window to have vertical tabs with nested tabs, as a psuedo live-bookmark organization system for a current project. But it's not a daily driver for me.
> Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't).
Are you kidding? I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
Using the drag-and-drop feature that splits the screen between two GUIs already marks the office power user, a third windows on a single screen brings us into the territory of the hardcore nerds running tiling window managers.
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.
Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.
The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.
Do you interact with a lot of people using macs? I find that Mac users don’t maximize their windows. They leave them cluttered everywhere; all the people I know on Windows maximize their windows.
Do you have a tiny monitor? I find that people with small mointors maximize their windows because they have to.
I have a 27" widescreen. The idea of maximizing a browser window is absurdity. My monitor can comfortably show three websites side by side. The amount of wasted white space on a full screen website would approach 90%.
Here's this very post fullscreened (without a taskbar). What a wild waste of space and the content is clearly not designed to be viewed like this, with the UX being located at the top left lol.
Because that is clearly not the norm for webpages? You're picking deliberate low-tech html pages. HN and memeorandum are not representative of the internet at large.
Honestly, man I don't care for this conversation. You do you bae. I was merely offering an observation of what I've seen from people and you're not even talking about that.
FWIW, I run my browser full screen. I run most apps full screen. By full screen, I don't mean that weird macos thing where it removes everything and locks you into a single app in a single workspace but the more standard one where the window is just expanded to fill the screen space.
The only time I run an app without fullscreen-ing it is if I don't have to do much in it or it doesn't have enough content to use up all the space anyways. Like system settings. Otherwise, I am using the app -> I am focusing on it -> I want it to take all the space it wants and show me everything going on inside it. My browser and my text editor are apps where I spend 99% of my time so they are always full screen.
It used to be possible to run web pages and applications not full screen. But moderne UIs are so wasteful of space, with massive icons, it has become almost impossible.
People don't maximize their windows? I have a 16:9 4k monitor and I maximize everything (browser, IDE, image editor, terminal, mail client) except for the rare occasion when I need something viewed side by side (editor+browser, terminal+browser, 2 file browsers, etc.).
Most websites handle it just fine, for the advanced interface of Mastodon the screen could be even wider! For the rare website that doesn't handle 16:9 well I have this bookmarklet:
One of my monitors is 9:16 - I've rotated it 90°. It's terrific for reading PDF documents, web pages, a terminal, and the IDE.
The only thing it's not really good for is the email client, video, and pictures. For those I have another monitor in the standard landscape configuration.
I used to have a similar setup, but I replaced the dual head setup (24" 9:16 and 30" 16:9) with one ultrawide one.
I suppose just as wide 16:9 display would have been even nicer, but it's fine. There are some benefits in window placement in having just a single screen, even if window managers could work better for this use (e.g. have a "second screen" region where there are separate workspaces).
I run everything maximized on my 32:9 and it's fine to me.
(I've never had overlapping windows in my life -- I find seeing more than one thing super distracting and it annoys me that this seems to be the default on Macs)
While the majority probably does, I don’t maximize anything that doesn’t have subpanels by default (like IDEs). In particular, I generally size application windows such that their main text content (if any) takes up a suitable middle column on the screen. That also means that I often have application windows with fixed-sized side panels not fill the whole width of the screen. My browser windows are by default something between 5:4 and 4:3-sized. Even with vertical tabs, the added width wouldn’t be enough to make them full-width.
> And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.
The Firefox and Edge implementations have a collapsible panel for the vertical tabs. I agree if they didn't, it would be worse than horizontal tabs.
However, my pet peeve is that it's now impossible to disable tabs altogether, say when using a tiling WM that implements tabbing itself, controllable with the usual shortcuts. Firefox has an extension that always moves tabs to a separate window, but it's janky.
Tabs visible at all is wasted space. I only need to see the options when I'm actively trying to change tab. I don't need to see them on the screen at all times.
This is one of the things I love about my Emacs config. I just hit a key to get things like buffers or file trees up when I need them, then they disappear.
I'd love to have a keyboard driven browser but whenever I've tried I always end up with one hand on the mouse anyway so it doesn't work.
Have you tried vimium? It's amazing. You can press a single key to search tabs, a single key to search history, bookmarks, and many other functionalities. Not using a mouse is also pretty easy with the link navigation feature (f by default), but even with one hand the commands are so succinct that it works well.
But that wasn't the point of the person you are responding to anyway. The point is all the empty wasted space that was above the tabs before it was removed and the tabs moved to the top.
Not to mention that many Web sites are not optimized for modern screens, let alone truly large ones. There are still far too many absurdly narrow vertical text columns, riddled with tiny non-expandable images, on sites that appear to cater to 640 x 480 screens of yore.
The Thunderbird search bar really sucks. Advanced search with the actual functionality is hidden away behind some weird menu while the big honking bar at the top of each page does basic text search and offers nothing more.
> I understand that search bar position is not changeable by theming,
It is changeable. With enough dedication you can go a long way just with CSS.
In this case it is even rather easy because the "unified toolbar" the thing containing the search box, the menu bar (if shown) and the tab bar are three elements in the same flex box. They can be reordered by setting the order property.
Only downside in this case is that (if client side decoration is not disabled in the settings) the window buttons (close, minimize) are also part of the unified toolbar and would end (without further fixes) below the tab bar.
As a quick (and dirty) experiment I moved the tab bar left to the search bar in the same row just with:
And a hacky way which often works good enough is to reposition and hardcode stuff with position:absolute/fixed/sticky.
Finally Thunderbird's own customization dialog can be used to fill the empty space around the search bar. By default it has a spacer left and right but that is easy to change even without custom CSS.
That we can search at all is nearly a miracle given the old and bad infra.
At least they work hard (I hope) on replacing the old system with a real database. That should enable the conversation view (Gmail-like), too!
The current "conversation view" is misnomer. There really is nothing like that.
Again, just think of Gmail and how it's handled there. This is how it would look like, e.g. you actually see your own response, too.
Currently this is impossible because Thunderbird does not actually know what messages belong together. It just applies some ugly hacks to even find the ingoing emails. It's a trainwreck, but I believe it will get better and we will finally have some decent mail software out there.
I wouldn't describe it as a hack, it uses the references in the messages themselves, as long as they are accurate it will work perfectly. This is the same way, Thunderbird knows if you have replied/forwarded messages.
> you actually see your own response
I do see the response, why wouldn't I that's what the feature is for. Not sure if there is a bug for you.
Do the people who style their app actually use their app on a daily basis for long amount of time ? It seems to me the basic design of app are often the best for eye fatigue, frequent usage, recognizing which information is where fast, contrast, low margin / good usage of space etc. The current design of Thunderbird is not pretty, but it's effective. I used Thunderbird everyday for 10+ years with 100k+ emails in 10+ email boxes, never once did I think about changing the design
Yes, I style my LibreWolf/Floorp desktop applications to suit my preferences/workflow and I spend 8+ hours a day using them. I hide elements I don't need, make my sidebar tabs auto collapse/expand when I hover over them, change the scaling factor.
While yes, the basic design is good and works for 90% of people that use Firefox, I have over the last decade developed a personal a workflow that works very well for me, and i would argue is much more efficient than the average users. The advantage of open source software is that you can mold them into the shape that suits your preferences.
> It seems to me the basic design of app are often the best
Considering the plethora of options, I'd say it's impossible to say what is better until an alternative is tried. And then you can only say that particular alternative is not better than basic, but you still can't say basic is best.
People that style their apps try many alternatives, and often find things that work better than basic for them.
Generally if I care enough to style/mod an app it’s because I’m using it a lot and its stock UI isn’t doing the trick.
Sometimes it can also drive me to switch to a different app, like with Firefox. FF used to be my secondary browser, but Zen (a Firefox fork) aligns with my needs and preferences better and doesn’t require userChrome mods and addons that are likely to break after some random update some day, so I switched.
Thunderbird would benefit from its own Zen-like fork in my opinion. Its UI has always felt clunky and awkward, and the “new” design just shifts around the awkwardness.
As someone who thinks browser UI peaked in 2008, Zen just feels like Firefox UI designers on ritalin. Had to about:config hack it to show the KDE system titlebar. This software is not for me.
Since a couple of the machines I use regularly have small screens (12-13”), hiding the standard titlebar and collapsing browser UI elements into the titlebar area were among the userChrome mods I had been applying to Firefox, so that particular bit of UI design in Zen is desirable for me.
On desk-bound machines hooked to 27” displays, this isn’t really necessary, but the UI being built around vertical tabs as the standard (as opposed to most browsers, where vertical tabs are a tacked-on afterthought if they’re even supported without addons) is still a relevant selling point.
> Do the people who style their app actually use their app on a daily basis for long amount of time ?
yes, I'm not wasting my time customizing something unless I use it frequently.
Not a Thunderbird user, but the Outlook default looks similar to the screenshot on the linked page. Initial things that drive me crazy; 1) left pane is a complete waste of screen real estate. I have mine collapsed to just be icons, it's about 1/6th the width as what's shown. It expands if I need it to (on tap/hover). 2) I like my inbox above my message preview not next to it. On the inbox pane, I get From & Subject on line 1 and initial message text on line 2. Same real estate with more content and context. I really like having the message preview line without actually clicking on the message.
Also, by having the message preview pane wider than tall, long paragraphs do not wrap so abruptly and I get more content on the screen. This lessens my need to scroll unless the message has a lot of paragraphs or images. Same for the initial message preview that's visible in the inbox line 2, if it's wider I can see more text. For a lot of emails, I find they are short enough that I can read it all in the inbox without even looking at the message pane. This means I can scroll/scan my inbox quickly without opening each item in the message pane to view it.
Anyways, I wouldn't care if I didn't use Outlook daily. For some people, maybe the defaults work but I feel like I get a lot of productivity out of these minor customizations
I've used thunderbird for over 20 years and used many others inbetween: sylpheed, the bat, evolution, kmail, Pegasus.
I still have Thunderbird installed and configured for the odd "advanced task", but my daily driver has been Geary for over 10 years now. Precisely because its so much better looking than thunderbird.
Looks, done properly, are an important part of a good UX. For me, less clutter, more whitespace, clearer focus, works far better than the "widgets thrown onto a square" that Thunderbird is (I have ADHD, it may contribute to this preference for clean, simple, focused design)
Something not making my eyeballs bleed is part-and-parcel to me actually wanting to use it. I value function over form, but Thunderbird has never been a looker. Plenty of UX friction too. It's just convoluted and messy.
Screens these days are huge and high resolution, and my eyes aren't getting any younger. I'm finding that I like more white space and padding as time goes on.
For normal Thunderbird, I swapped from the more compact options to the most loose/padded options.
Screens are huge, that's why I want to take advantage of it and fit more windows on them, not less. But with how foamy modern apps are, it can be a struggle to have two windows side by side on a 2560px wide 27" screen and not have content cut off that would've been perfectly visible on an 800px screen 20 years ago.
I agree with others about the search bar, kind of looks like a fallen tree in an otherwise pristine field of aero grass.
I love the translucency look of "Fluent" design though. Windows Terminal has a "Use acrylic material in the tab row" which I like to enable. It feels like a callback to Windows 7's Aero which I miss.
Perhaps together with Microsoft's Fluent/acrylic design and Apple's WIP Liquid Glass UI, and with projects like this Thunderbird theme bringing the design to OSS projects, we can bring back some of the optimism and beauty of those early glass designs.
This isn't Thunderbird. This is a Thunderbird theme.
Normal Thunderbird still gets two to three dozen email subject lines on the screen. I absolutely love it, I've been using it for over 20 years through the rough and through the good. We're in a good period now, and it's been a good period for quite some time.
just tried installing it in case last time I tried it >5 years ago was during the "rough".
I was impressed that it correctly inferred the IMAP and SMTP settings for my custom domain name, but after using it for ~30 seconds random old emails started appearing at the top of the email list, above my latest emails.
Maybe I'll try again in another 5 years.
edit: someone thinks i didn't wait for imap to finish. I did. My latest email appeared at the top. Then 30 seconds later some ancient emails popped up above it, seemingly triggered by scrolling in the email list pane.
Probably the same vendetta they I have against Windows. Every time I try it, I find it so frustrating. So every time I try, I afford it less and less patience.
I get something like that in the initial IMAP sync. Some of my old emails will surface to the top with the current date as today. Never really bothered looking into as it only happens once, but I've been assuming that the date header on those emails were missing.
Yes, I also had that problem and this is exactly the cause. When you resync the mailbox later it gets redated again. It is actually really stupid, because there are only TWO mandatory headers: Date and From. Getting this wrong seams to be really incompetent of the sender software.
Overview, seeing threads with more than a handful of e-mails completely, selection, tagging, dragging, deleting, marking as spam, in general all kinds of bulk actions.
A couple years ago I did run one of early Thunderbird versions in a Windows7 VM and it did look amazing too. TB designers are likely trying to improve UI but most updates are just change how it looks not necessary making it look better or improving UX. Though quick filter is a relatively recent addition if I'm not mistaken and I use it a lot.
Now if only Thunderbird weren’t a clunky POS. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve given it another chance after people swear “it’s really better now” again.
Still refuses to follow chosen settings for how much mail data to download/store locally (it always eventually downloads everything).
I have the opposite problem: I absolutely cannot get it to download everything. What it does do, however, is constantly re-download mail, to the point that it's extremely slow and regularly pops up "folder cannot be compacted because another operation is in progress" errors when I'm just trying to click on folders.
> Also, note that some areas of ThunderBird are rendered outside of the influence of userChrome.css in a "Shadow DOM" - as such, it is not possible to fully theme all elements of Thunderbird.
With some limitations it is possible to restyle Shadow DOM elements. It is just a lot harder to select the right element if it is inside a shadow dom.
I found a workaround (don't remember where I found it) which I use extensively in my personal userChrome.css.
The basic concept (afair) is that you can write selectors which match inside the shadow dom as long as they do not need to "cross" the shadow dom "boundary".
A good starting point for me is often to select by tag and part attribute, e.g. image[part="icon"] { ... }
Now the trick to style a particular instance of a web component (shadow dom instance) is to use variables and defaults.
With a selector which targets the "root element" of the shadow dom I set variables for any value I want to change and with a selector which is fully inside the shadow dom I add styles using the variable (which is then only defined for that particular instance) or a default which effectively cancels my custom style anywhere else.
As concrete example the dialog to create new calendar events has a drop down box to select the calendar where each entry is prefixed with a dot with calendar color.
The menulist has a shadow dom and the menupopup another. I styled those dots as squares (for fun and because I think the modern web is to round).
So to set the variables on the "outside" I have:
(the variable prefix "parthack" has no special meaning; it just evolved because I initially used it to hack styles onto shadow dom elements over the part attribute)
Now this will change only the icons only in the menulist with id 'item-calendar' and leave others unchanged. Whether I use revert-layer as default or something else depends on what style the element has by default and try and error.
> it is also not possible to theme the settings areas.
I don't see a reason why this should not work. If by settings area the author means the settings page which in modern Thunderbird is more or less a web page in the content area, it should be stylable with userContent.css instead of userChrome.css.
The hard part is to find the right @-moz-document selectors for each individual content page.
Don't know what exactly PostCSS is but with a JavaScript addon it would probably be wiser to inject the custom css directly into the shadow dom instance if possible and avoiding such hacks.
Also, by the way, when JavaScript addons get involved: userChrome.css is applied quite unfortunate in the css cascade. It gets low priority that is why they are usually full of !important rules. With JavaScript it is possible to add custom css instead as so called author stylesheet which makes it easier to override default styles. (never tried it myself)
I'm still using the Monterail theme for Thunderbird [0], which sadly seems to have never really progressed beyond the proof-of-concept stage and hasn't been updated in eight years.
Is there any extension for Thunderbird that can handle "External Accounts" per-address signatures and sending identities already configured on a Gmail account?
I always go "I'll check out Thunderbird again" then "nope" out when I see it can't handle this kind of set up in the OOBE and most extensions don't receive ongoing support and thus stop being compatible.
I use Gmail on my phone and Pixel Watch, so ditching this setup is a non-starter as reconfiguring something as basic as email every time I get a new device or switch distros isn't my idea of a good time.
because barely anybody is making desktop mail/calendar/contacts clients anymore. There is very little development in that market as most people have moved to web interfaces
There really isn't even if you don't need all the bells and whistles. I want my email client to be as simple and minimal as possible and Thunderbird seemed like the last candidate for this. Surprisingly it's the only one I could theme and strip down enough to meet my need.
It is apparently also hard to maintain over time. I heavily customized my Firefox and Thunderbird and it is annoying how often GUI components which should be equal (e.g. toolbar buttons in different places) look the same* but have multiple different CSS rules.
Some widgets, or rather the repeated reinventions of widgets in HTML+CSS, use variables and the next equally looking widget has none, or other variables with the same values.
From an outsider perspective it looks like a mess.
* or almost the same with minimal, likely unintended, differences like one button has a slight border when hovered but another button right next to it has none
At first glance, it's visually pleasing... but I need to see a screenshot with 20-50 folders next!
(I use a modified https://johnnydecimal.com/ for email folders, and have probably close to 100 folders, though most stay collapsed so you might see ~20 at one time.)
I understand that search bar position is not changeable by theming, it's a Thunderbird team's decision, but it irks me to see it take up so much premium space. It was the same with browsers, it took many years and iterations to get where we are now (tabs on top, no wasted space) and I think those lessons should be carried over.
> where we are now (tabs on top, no wasted space)
Tabs at the top is wasted space, I much prefer my tabs on the side instead, as most web content is taller than it is wide, and I have a widescreen monitor. I understand the choice of tabs on top when 640x480 was the most common resolution, but for desktop usage today? Tabs on top seems like an outdated layout choice.
Options are good. I hate having tabs or other controls vertically on the side. I like them at the top. There's no reason we can't both be happy.
I want both via a single button-press, or defaults per-monitor.
What I want on an ultrawide isn't what I want on a portrait 16:9 side monitor.
I generally have the same hatred but oddly on Mac OS I prefer the Dock on the right side. I've been dual Win/Mac user and have had this preference on Mac for a long time. Not sure why as it goes against almost everything else I do LOL
I had my Mac dock on the side for a while, but I’m back to bottom dock as I work with two external monitors and just leave the dock on the laptop display. I also had the taskbar on the left of my Win2k setup for quite some time but these days I hardly use windows outside of gaming so it just stays where it is by default
Yeah this. What should irk about search bar is cannot be moved. The static nature of UI these days stinks when back in the day we aimed for more composable user facing apps. Mod games by dumping a model file in a dir; boomed recomposed the experience.
Now it’s all micro transactions so an MBA doesn’t have to work anymore.
Now those are power user and dev tools and users get what they decided was the just right info dense or sparse design.
I still fall a slight bit in love when an application has a “Customize…” option attached to the menu/ribbon/whatever. I had Word set up just the way I wanted it some 20 years ago
There are browser - Vivaldi for example - that allow you to place the tab strip on any edge you want. To me personally it just looks and feels wrong, maybe just because of years of exposure to tabs on the top, but I can not get used to it, even though I have to admit that the tab labels are much nicer to read on the left if you have sufficiently many tabs open.
Not only does Vivaldi allow you to do that, but you can customise every menu in the program. I've modified the context menu to have exactly the things I want, in the order I want them. This is what Firefox should have been.
It's too bad I'll have to dump Vivaldi soon, now that Google is killing adblockers.
I’ve been daily driving Arc for a while now and I’m very sold on the tabs on the left. I think it’s the mix of smart folders, pinned pages, and knowing that stale tabs will be automatically closed so it doesn’t ever feel too cluttered. Also the quick show/hide with Cmd+s is perfect, especially since it’s been quite a while since I’ve wanted to Save a webpage.
Side note: it infuriates me that Microsoft’s web-Office will “helpfully” remind me that it auto saves when I do Cmd+s but also captures the event so that Arc can’t handle it. Which reminds me…I can probably whip up a quick Boost to get rid of that - yay rubber ducking in the comments!
Tree Style Tabs! Tree Style Tabs! Tree Style Tabs!
I have Tree Style Tabs on my personal computer, and Sideberry on my work computer. Sideberry is much better and much faster.
I've always been sad "tabs + browser bar + title bar" (i.e. in a single row) at the top never seems to stick around as an option. On larger monitors this results in a near perfect utilization of space while still being able to have reasonably wide tab titles.
Vivaldi & Floorp offer this through being highly customizable but they tend to have cracks around the edges of their use for the same reason.
I was first introduced to this with a Chrome flag back in 2011 https://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-new-compact-navigation-f... but they ended up backing out for various reasons (the largest of which was probably the specific design used a pop-down url bar which went over the page area, so could be spoofed).
In 2021 Safari became the largest browser I've seen roll this out as a 1st party feature to general users, but it faced some backlash https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-get-more-space-in-safar... I'm not a big fan of their particular styling choices but the layout was pretty decent.
…and the beta of macOS 26 has removed that Safari layout.
This is a popular argument, just one small problem with it: the 4:3 displays of old (640×480 et al) were also "wide" rather than "tall". So by this logic, there would have never been a time where horizontal tabs (or indeed, a horizontal taskbar) would have "made sense".
So I think it's reasonably easy to see that this is not and was never the actual driver behind this decision. It's completely retconned.
The driver was that unless you have a large number of tabs, vertical tabs waste more space than horizontal tabs, due to the width of the tabs column for vertical tabs vs. the height of the tabs row for horizontal tabs. Like in this [0] random example with just single tabs, there is a lot more wasted space on the left and right (below “My Notebook” and “Phonetics”) than on the top (to the right of “New Section 1”). If we used a vertical writing system instead of a horizontal one, we’d have had vertical tabs from the start.
Widescreen monitors afford that wasting of space better.
[0] http://www.onenotegem.com/uploads/allimg/191124/12310QH9-3.g...
Well, 4:3 is less wide than 16:9 or 16:10 or whatever else we're doing these days.
But, I do agree that this was likely never the driver. In fact, I've always thought the "obvious" explanation is simply that window controls and title bars are at the top, and since tabs are like nested windows inside a window, they would follow basically the same patterns...
Horizontal space is still a premium regardless of monitor size when designing/building for responsive viewports. Vertical space is almost zero cost in terms of design constraints.
Even on large monitors you'd be surprised the number of people at 150% zoom with small windows opened instead of fullscreen.
Being able to scroll on unfocused applications has been a game changer for non-fullscreen uses. I never zoom though, except HN
Since nobody mentioned, Firefox and I think Chrome has vertical tabs, Firefox is just released https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/140.0/releasenotes/
Putting often used controls (tabs, docs, menus, etc) across the long side has a solid argument going for it too, though: your mouse pointer is almost always closer to one of the long sides.
Also, if vertical screen estate is a concern, just turn your monitor 90° A lot of professionals working with paper sized documents (legal, bookkeeping, administration) do this.
As a software engineer, I've tried it, but I prefer splitting windows (tiling, or panes or such) horizontally. So my estate is limited in width more than in height.
Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't). My (multiple) browser windows on my very big wide screen are all roughly in 4:3 ~square shape and top tabs make a lot more sense.
And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.
Every once in a while I wouldn't mind for a specific window to have vertical tabs with nested tabs, as a psuedo live-bookmark organization system for a current project. But it's not a daily driver for me.
> Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't).
Are you kidding? I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
Using the drag-and-drop feature that splits the screen between two GUIs already marks the office power user, a third windows on a single screen brings us into the territory of the hardcore nerds running tiling window managers.
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.
Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.
The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.
Do you interact with a lot of people using macs? I find that Mac users don’t maximize their windows. They leave them cluttered everywhere; all the people I know on Windows maximize their windows.
Do you have a tiny monitor? I find that people with small mointors maximize their windows because they have to.
I have a 27" widescreen. The idea of maximizing a browser window is absurdity. My monitor can comfortably show three websites side by side. The amount of wasted white space on a full screen website would approach 90%.
Here's this very post fullscreened (without a taskbar). What a wild waste of space and the content is clearly not designed to be viewed like this, with the UX being located at the top left lol.
https://i.imgur.com/NPxks8b.png
No I have the same size monitor. I don’t think HN is the best website to choose to make your point though.
Ok here's another one, a news site. https://i.imgur.com/4s6Jzvn.png
What does having 60% of my screen be purple do for me? Why would you choose that?
Because that is clearly not the norm for webpages? You're picking deliberate low-tech html pages. HN and memeorandum are not representative of the internet at large.
Honestly, man I don't care for this conversation. You do you bae. I was merely offering an observation of what I've seen from people and you're not even talking about that.
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
I've never had my browser in fullscreen unless it's media content.
I too prefer tabs at top than to the side, as I have four screens, 2x32' and 2x27' -- having the tabs at the top of my top screen feels more natural.
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
Do you mean maximized? I might agree if you do. I almost never see browsers full screen except when playing videos.
FWIW, I run my browser full screen. I run most apps full screen. By full screen, I don't mean that weird macos thing where it removes everything and locks you into a single app in a single workspace but the more standard one where the window is just expanded to fill the screen space.
The only time I run an app without fullscreen-ing it is if I don't have to do much in it or it doesn't have enough content to use up all the space anyways. Like system settings. Otherwise, I am using the app -> I am focusing on it -> I want it to take all the space it wants and show me everything going on inside it. My browser and my text editor are apps where I spend 99% of my time so they are always full screen.
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
I have no idea what the statistics are, but I certainly never run the browser fullscreen and I rarely see others do so.
It used to be possible to run web pages and applications not full screen. But moderne UIs are so wasteful of space, with massive icons, it has become almost impossible.
The only things I run full-screen on a big monitor are drawing programs and development tools.
People don't maximize their windows? I have a 16:9 4k monitor and I maximize everything (browser, IDE, image editor, terminal, mail client) except for the rare occasion when I need something viewed side by side (editor+browser, terminal+browser, 2 file browsers, etc.).
Is the web not a terrible experience in 16:9? My main browser window is closer to 1:1, and even then I have tabs on the left.
Most websites handle it just fine, for the advanced interface of Mastodon the screen could be even wider! For the rare website that doesn't handle 16:9 well I have this bookmarklet:
javascript:var%20b=document.documentElement;b.style.width='900px';b.style.marginLeft='auto';b.style.marginRight='auto';void(0)
One of my monitors is 9:16 - I've rotated it 90°. It's terrific for reading PDF documents, web pages, a terminal, and the IDE.
The only thing it's not really good for is the email client, video, and pictures. For those I have another monitor in the standard landscape configuration.
I used to have a similar setup, but I replaced the dual head setup (24" 9:16 and 30" 16:9) with one ultrawide one.
I suppose just as wide 16:9 display would have been even nicer, but it's fine. There are some benefits in window placement in having just a single screen, even if window managers could work better for this use (e.g. have a "second screen" region where there are separate workspaces).
I run everything maximized on my 32:9 and it's fine to me.
(I've never had overlapping windows in my life -- I find seeing more than one thing super distracting and it annoys me that this seems to be the default on Macs)
It's not.
While the majority probably does, I don’t maximize anything that doesn’t have subpanels by default (like IDEs). In particular, I generally size application windows such that their main text content (if any) takes up a suitable middle column on the screen. That also means that I often have application windows with fixed-sized side panels not fill the whole width of the screen. My browser windows are by default something between 5:4 and 4:3-sized. Even with vertical tabs, the added width wouldn’t be enough to make them full-width.
> And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.
The Firefox and Edge implementations have a collapsible panel for the vertical tabs. I agree if they didn't, it would be worse than horizontal tabs.
However, my pet peeve is that it's now impossible to disable tabs altogether, say when using a tiling WM that implements tabbing itself, controllable with the usual shortcuts. Firefox has an extension that always moves tabs to a separate window, but it's janky.
> my pet peeve is that it's now impossible to disable tabs altogether
Yeah, being able to do that would be really nice.
Tabs visible at all is wasted space. I only need to see the options when I'm actively trying to change tab. I don't need to see them on the screen at all times.
This is one of the things I love about my Emacs config. I just hit a key to get things like buffers or file trees up when I need them, then they disappear.
I'd love to have a keyboard driven browser but whenever I've tried I always end up with one hand on the mouse anyway so it doesn't work.
Have you tried vimium? It's amazing. You can press a single key to search tabs, a single key to search history, bookmarks, and many other functionalities. Not using a mouse is also pretty easy with the link navigation feature (f by default), but even with one hand the commands are so succinct that it works well.
> Tabs at the top is wasted space
Not if your screen is in portrait orientation.
But that wasn't the point of the person you are responding to anyway. The point is all the empty wasted space that was above the tabs before it was removed and the tabs moved to the top.
Not if you're using side-by-side windows.
This. Side by side windows and horizontal splits make it so vertical tabs are not that useful.
TBH in general I find tabs less useful as they multiply. Most of the time I just Cmd+A in chrome to search for the tab I need.
Not to mention that many Web sites are not optimized for modern screens, let alone truly large ones. There are still far too many absurdly narrow vertical text columns, riddled with tiny non-expandable images, on sites that appear to cater to 640 x 480 screens of yore.
The Thunderbird search bar really sucks. Advanced search with the actual functionality is hidden away behind some weird menu while the big honking bar at the top of each page does basic text search and offers nothing more.
The search bar does filtering in the current folder. Fast, simple, and what I most commonly want.
Indeed. Take a look at late 1990s software, even things with complex toolbars (Word, Corel Draw, etc).
At 640x480 resolution, the toolbar was tiny but powerful.
Now at 1920x1080 resolution the toolbar is relatively huge and dumbed down.
All the benefits of higher resolutions and larger monitors have been lost on stupid UI trends.
> I understand that search bar position is not changeable by theming,
It is changeable. With enough dedication you can go a long way just with CSS.
In this case it is even rather easy because the "unified toolbar" the thing containing the search box, the menu bar (if shown) and the tab bar are three elements in the same flex box. They can be reordered by setting the order property.
Only downside in this case is that (if client side decoration is not disabled in the settings) the window buttons (close, minimize) are also part of the unified toolbar and would end (without further fixes) below the tab bar.
As a quick (and dirty) experiment I moved the tab bar left to the search bar in the same row just with:
And a hacky way which often works good enough is to reposition and hardcode stuff with position:absolute/fixed/sticky.Finally Thunderbird's own customization dialog can be used to fill the empty space around the search bar. By default it has a spacer left and right but that is easy to change even without custom CSS.
> tabs on top, no wasted space) and I think those lessons should be carried over.
hell no. I want the title bar, the scrollbars and the window border back. I work with more than one window.
How do scroll bars help manage multiple windows?
Makes it much easier to see where one window ends.
That's what borders are for? Style them better to make them fulfill their role?
I agree with you but it irks me more that the search doesn't find the content I'm looking for. Apple Mail search feels much more useful.
Quick filters have almost completely replaced search for me.
While that does speak to the strength of TB’s Quick filters it’s also an indictment of its search
That we can search at all is nearly a miracle given the old and bad infra. At least they work hard (I hope) on replacing the old system with a real database. That should enable the conversation view (Gmail-like), too!
How would that look like and how does it differ from the conversation view Thunderbird already has?
The current "conversation view" is misnomer. There really is nothing like that. Again, just think of Gmail and how it's handled there. This is how it would look like, e.g. you actually see your own response, too. Currently this is impossible because Thunderbird does not actually know what messages belong together. It just applies some ugly hacks to even find the ingoing emails. It's a trainwreck, but I believe it will get better and we will finally have some decent mail software out there.
> just think of Gmail
>> How would that look like?
I wouldn't describe it as a hack, it uses the references in the messages themselves, as long as they are accurate it will work perfectly. This is the same way, Thunderbird knows if you have replied/forwarded messages.
> you actually see your own response
I do see the response, why wouldn't I that's what the feature is for. Not sure if there is a bug for you.
There is plenty wasted space in browser tabs, from close buttons to padding to rounded/non-rect corners
Do the people who style their app actually use their app on a daily basis for long amount of time ? It seems to me the basic design of app are often the best for eye fatigue, frequent usage, recognizing which information is where fast, contrast, low margin / good usage of space etc. The current design of Thunderbird is not pretty, but it's effective. I used Thunderbird everyday for 10+ years with 100k+ emails in 10+ email boxes, never once did I think about changing the design
Yes, I style my LibreWolf/Floorp desktop applications to suit my preferences/workflow and I spend 8+ hours a day using them. I hide elements I don't need, make my sidebar tabs auto collapse/expand when I hover over them, change the scaling factor. While yes, the basic design is good and works for 90% of people that use Firefox, I have over the last decade developed a personal a workflow that works very well for me, and i would argue is much more efficient than the average users. The advantage of open source software is that you can mold them into the shape that suits your preferences.
If you ever document it, I'd love to read about your workflow. me@hammyhavoc.com
> It seems to me the basic design of app are often the best
Considering the plethora of options, I'd say it's impossible to say what is better until an alternative is tried. And then you can only say that particular alternative is not better than basic, but you still can't say basic is best.
People that style their apps try many alternatives, and often find things that work better than basic for them.
Generally if I care enough to style/mod an app it’s because I’m using it a lot and its stock UI isn’t doing the trick.
Sometimes it can also drive me to switch to a different app, like with Firefox. FF used to be my secondary browser, but Zen (a Firefox fork) aligns with my needs and preferences better and doesn’t require userChrome mods and addons that are likely to break after some random update some day, so I switched.
Thunderbird would benefit from its own Zen-like fork in my opinion. Its UI has always felt clunky and awkward, and the “new” design just shifts around the awkwardness.
As someone who thinks browser UI peaked in 2008, Zen just feels like Firefox UI designers on ritalin. Had to about:config hack it to show the KDE system titlebar. This software is not for me.
Since a couple of the machines I use regularly have small screens (12-13”), hiding the standard titlebar and collapsing browser UI elements into the titlebar area were among the userChrome mods I had been applying to Firefox, so that particular bit of UI design in Zen is desirable for me.
On desk-bound machines hooked to 27” displays, this isn’t really necessary, but the UI being built around vertical tabs as the standard (as opposed to most browsers, where vertical tabs are a tacked-on afterthought if they’re even supported without addons) is still a relevant selling point.
> Do the people who style their app actually use their app on a daily basis for long amount of time ?
yes, I'm not wasting my time customizing something unless I use it frequently.
Not a Thunderbird user, but the Outlook default looks similar to the screenshot on the linked page. Initial things that drive me crazy; 1) left pane is a complete waste of screen real estate. I have mine collapsed to just be icons, it's about 1/6th the width as what's shown. It expands if I need it to (on tap/hover). 2) I like my inbox above my message preview not next to it. On the inbox pane, I get From & Subject on line 1 and initial message text on line 2. Same real estate with more content and context. I really like having the message preview line without actually clicking on the message.
Also, by having the message preview pane wider than tall, long paragraphs do not wrap so abruptly and I get more content on the screen. This lessens my need to scroll unless the message has a lot of paragraphs or images. Same for the initial message preview that's visible in the inbox line 2, if it's wider I can see more text. For a lot of emails, I find they are short enough that I can read it all in the inbox without even looking at the message pane. This means I can scroll/scan my inbox quickly without opening each item in the message pane to view it.
Anyways, I wouldn't care if I didn't use Outlook daily. For some people, maybe the defaults work but I feel like I get a lot of productivity out of these minor customizations
I would love to know what software Atlassian uses to maintain documentation, because I have a hard time believing they’re eating their own dog food.
Confluence, and DAC mostly
I've used thunderbird for over 20 years and used many others inbetween: sylpheed, the bat, evolution, kmail, Pegasus.
I still have Thunderbird installed and configured for the odd "advanced task", but my daily driver has been Geary for over 10 years now. Precisely because its so much better looking than thunderbird.
Looks, done properly, are an important part of a good UX. For me, less clutter, more whitespace, clearer focus, works far better than the "widgets thrown onto a square" that Thunderbird is (I have ADHD, it may contribute to this preference for clean, simple, focused design)
Something not making my eyeballs bleed is part-and-parcel to me actually wanting to use it. I value function over form, but Thunderbird has never been a looker. Plenty of UX friction too. It's just convoluted and messy.
Maybe I am the only one who didn't know this. It seems "fluent" doesn't refer to a fluent interface in programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface but rather its a name of a Microsoft style https://fluent2.microsoft.design
Perhaps embarrassingly, I knew the second one, but not the first.
Screens these days are huge and high resolution, and my eyes aren't getting any younger. I'm finding that I like more white space and padding as time goes on.
For normal Thunderbird, I swapped from the more compact options to the most loose/padded options.
Screens are huge, that's why I want to take advantage of it and fit more windows on them, not less. But with how foamy modern apps are, it can be a struggle to have two windows side by side on a 2560px wide 27" screen and not have content cut off that would've been perfectly visible on an 800px screen 20 years ago.
For your eyes you'd better have larger text instead of wasting the same space with floating
I do both.
But the design we're discussing doesn't
There's a lot of padding in the screenshot, but you can also see that any user can reduce it by resizing the sidebar and inbox column.
This wouldn't help with big left padding, nor with the top one
Much padding, such space. Wow.
(Couldn't resist...)
I agree with others about the search bar, kind of looks like a fallen tree in an otherwise pristine field of aero grass.
I love the translucency look of "Fluent" design though. Windows Terminal has a "Use acrylic material in the tab row" which I like to enable. It feels like a callback to Windows 7's Aero which I miss.
Perhaps together with Microsoft's Fluent/acrylic design and Apple's WIP Liquid Glass UI, and with projects like this Thunderbird theme bringing the design to OSS projects, we can bring back some of the optimism and beauty of those early glass designs.
Had you told me back in 1995, that in 30 years we'd have 4K screens and I would only be able to see 10 emails in my inbox at one time...
Netscape 2.02 or Microsoft Mail client from back then looks amazing by comparison.
This isn't Thunderbird. This is a Thunderbird theme.
Normal Thunderbird still gets two to three dozen email subject lines on the screen. I absolutely love it, I've been using it for over 20 years through the rough and through the good. We're in a good period now, and it's been a good period for quite some time.
Not a fork of thunderbird. It's custom CSS that renders the thunderbird "chrome".
Corrected, thanks.
just tried installing it in case last time I tried it >5 years ago was during the "rough".
I was impressed that it correctly inferred the IMAP and SMTP settings for my custom domain name, but after using it for ~30 seconds random old emails started appearing at the top of the email list, above my latest emails.
Maybe I'll try again in another 5 years.
edit: someone thinks i didn't wait for imap to finish. I did. My latest email appeared at the top. Then 30 seconds later some ancient emails popped up above it, seemingly triggered by scrolling in the email list pane.
Or just maybe click the arrow to sort by date ?
I'm going to be controversial and say that if sorting by date isn't the default in an email client, it's a broken client.
That's beyond just breaking "Have sensible defaults", and is well into, "Your defaults are broken".
That's the default.
But it sounds like OPs mails were sorted differently for an unknown reason.
lol seriously, my guy didn't even wait until imap was done. what vendetta does he have against Thunderbird
Probably the same vendetta they I have against Windows. Every time I try it, I find it so frustrating. So every time I try, I afford it less and less patience.
I get something like that in the initial IMAP sync. Some of my old emails will surface to the top with the current date as today. Never really bothered looking into as it only happens once, but I've been assuming that the date header on those emails were missing.
Yes, I also had that problem and this is exactly the cause. When you resync the mailbox later it gets redated again. It is actually really stupid, because there are only TWO mandatory headers: Date and From. Getting this wrong seams to be really incompetent of the sender software.
i see, this likely happened to me.
Thats just a setting in thunderbird. Indont see the problem with personal preference to show less emails
I'm to young for Netscape, but do you mean this [^1] interface, that's truncating the subject and hiding the body?
Also, which use-cases do you have where you need to see 20 emails at once?
[^1]: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/ns_4_email.jpg
That interface is probably 640x480, so of course it’s truncating things.
And I’m sorry, you really can’t fathom why someone who gets a ton of email would want to see more of them in their inbox at the same time?
Well, you can have a higher screen resolution than 640x480, resize those columns, hide the ones you don't use...
Look at the Thunderbird 1 and 3 screenshots on that page
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/
Overview, seeing threads with more than a handful of e-mails completely, selection, tagging, dragging, deleting, marking as spam, in general all kinds of bulk actions.
time to make an email client...
A couple years ago I did run one of early Thunderbird versions in a Windows7 VM and it did look amazing too. TB designers are likely trying to improve UI but most updates are just change how it looks not necessary making it look better or improving UX. Though quick filter is a relatively recent addition if I'm not mistaken and I use it a lot.
Change it yourself then. It's right there in the documented CSS file. Not even overobscured SCSS!
And Netscape in 1995 look good in comparison to.. Pine?
Let me tell you then that you can see 9 lines of text in the e-mail which is currently opened.
Did he say it was Thunderbird?
Love the theme.
Now if only Thunderbird weren’t a clunky POS. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve given it another chance after people swear “it’s really better now” again.
Still refuses to follow chosen settings for how much mail data to download/store locally (it always eventually downloads everything).
JMAP support has been open for 9 years now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322991
It's wild to me they won't prioritize this. We have good JMAP providers like Fastmail, we just need client support
Isn't Fastmail basically the only one? What other well known provider supports JMAP?
Soon Thundermail by Mozilla!
it always eventually downloads everything
I have the opposite problem: I absolutely cannot get it to download everything. What it does do, however, is constantly re-download mail, to the point that it's extremely slow and regularly pops up "folder cannot be compacted because another operation is in progress" errors when I'm just trying to click on folders.
Why oh why can't the search default to "view as list" weeps
> Also, note that some areas of ThunderBird are rendered outside of the influence of userChrome.css in a "Shadow DOM" - as such, it is not possible to fully theme all elements of Thunderbird.
With some limitations it is possible to restyle Shadow DOM elements. It is just a lot harder to select the right element if it is inside a shadow dom.
I found a workaround (don't remember where I found it) which I use extensively in my personal userChrome.css.
The basic concept (afair) is that you can write selectors which match inside the shadow dom as long as they do not need to "cross" the shadow dom "boundary".
A good starting point for me is often to select by tag and part attribute, e.g. image[part="icon"] { ... }
Now the trick to style a particular instance of a web component (shadow dom instance) is to use variables and defaults.
With a selector which targets the "root element" of the shadow dom I set variables for any value I want to change and with a selector which is fully inside the shadow dom I add styles using the variable (which is then only defined for that particular instance) or a default which effectively cancels my custom style anywhere else.
As concrete example the dialog to create new calendar events has a drop down box to select the calendar where each entry is prefixed with a dot with calendar color. The menulist has a shadow dom and the menupopup another. I styled those dots as squares (for fun and because I think the modern web is to round). So to set the variables on the "outside" I have:
and to apply it (the variable prefix "parthack" has no special meaning; it just evolved because I initially used it to hack styles onto shadow dom elements over the part attribute)Now this will change only the icons only in the menulist with id 'item-calendar' and leave others unchanged. Whether I use revert-layer as default or something else depends on what style the element has by default and try and error.
Also
> it is also not possible to theme the settings areas.
I don't see a reason why this should not work. If by settings area the author means the settings page which in modern Thunderbird is more or less a web page in the content area, it should be stylable with userContent.css instead of userChrome.css.
The hard part is to find the right @-moz-document selectors for each individual content page.
Would it be possible to make a PostCSS plugin for this?
Don't know what exactly PostCSS is but with a JavaScript addon it would probably be wiser to inject the custom css directly into the shadow dom instance if possible and avoiding such hacks.
Also, by the way, when JavaScript addons get involved: userChrome.css is applied quite unfortunate in the css cascade. It gets low priority that is why they are usually full of !important rules. With JavaScript it is possible to add custom css instead as so called author stylesheet which makes it easier to override default styles. (never tried it myself)
https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/msoqte/how_can_...
I'm still using the Monterail theme for Thunderbird [0], which sadly seems to have never really progressed beyond the proof-of-concept stage and hasn't been updated in eight years.
[0] https://github.com/spymastermatt/thunderbird-monterail/
It's a good looking theme, and definitely fits the design, but I'll never understand why people want to make Thunderbird look like Outlook.
I'd say to make it aesthetically consistent with other apps on the platform, but (especially) Windows is a hodgepodge.
[dead]
Is there any extension for Thunderbird that can handle "External Accounts" per-address signatures and sending identities already configured on a Gmail account?
I always go "I'll check out Thunderbird again" then "nope" out when I see it can't handle this kind of set up in the OOBE and most extensions don't receive ongoing support and thus stop being compatible.
I use Gmail on my phone and Pixel Watch, so ditching this setup is a non-starter as reconfiguring something as basic as email every time I get a new device or switch distros isn't my idea of a good time.
1. Didn't realize Thunderbird was still available
2. Windows 11 design on macOS would be trippy.
1. There is no better open-source alternative for Windows for mail/calendar/contacts client.
because barely anybody is making desktop mail/calendar/contacts clients anymore. There is very little development in that market as most people have moved to web interfaces
And even Outlook is a web app these days, with "performance" to match.
Claws is available for windows. For my tastes,I'd call it "better" than Thunderbird.
https://www.claws-mail.org/win32/
I am using Mailspring (0) and it’s pretty good.
(0) https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring
There really isn't even if you don't need all the bells and whistles. I want my email client to be as simple and minimal as possible and Thunderbird seemed like the last candidate for this. Surprisingly it's the only one I could theme and strip down enough to meet my need.
Plain and simple is why I like macMail but it's a bit too simple and really mostly useful if you use iCloud email primarily.
macMail is _okay_ with fastmail
betterbird has "better" in the name
Honest question, what do you even need a native client for? What can you do on Thunderbird that you can't on a browser?
Store e-mails offline.
Looks cool, but the last thing I want to do is have my Thunderbird look like Outlook.
> Thunderbird
Ahh, does it still have the bug that may accidentally delete/corrupt all your emails?
Using CSS and not using the native implementation of the operating system is going to lead to very brittle and hard to fix problems.
It is apparently also hard to maintain over time. I heavily customized my Firefox and Thunderbird and it is annoying how often GUI components which should be equal (e.g. toolbar buttons in different places) look the same* but have multiple different CSS rules.
Some widgets, or rather the repeated reinventions of widgets in HTML+CSS, use variables and the next equally looking widget has none, or other variables with the same values.
From an outsider perspective it looks like a mess.
* or almost the same with minimal, likely unintended, differences like one button has a slight border when hovered but another button right next to it has none
At first glance, it's visually pleasing... but I need to see a screenshot with 20-50 folders next!
(I use a modified https://johnnydecimal.com/ for email folders, and have probably close to 100 folders, though most stay collapsed so you might see ~20 at one time.)
I love how much unused spaces this adds, I really needed more blank pixels in my mailbox instead of distracting text.