NeutralAxis

I took the plunge and updated to Thunderbird 3  now that the Lightning Calendar (1.0b1) has been updated to work with it.  There are a few differences, both positive and negative, in the change.

First, a key change in Thunderbird 3 is the addition of tabs.  That’s fine, but they’re used to excess in my opinion.  Even opening an email opens it in a tab.  If you want it separated into its own window like Thunderbird 2, you have to right click it and choose from a menu.  I don’t see any setting anywhere to adjust this behavior to automatically make emails open in a new window.  This is actually kind of a big inconvenience.  I decided to have a tab for my email and a tab for my calendar.  New emails open in tabs to the right of calendar.  When I close that email, TB3 just moves me one tab left to the calendar, which causes me to have to click the email tab to get back to my email view.  Tabs cannot be repositioned into a different order.  They are made left to right in the order they were opened.

A change I think might grow on me is the addition of a smart folder view where the inboxes of multiple accounts are grouped together, sent boxes are grouped together, etc.  Except for it not being crystal clear which account a message is in, I like it.  A column can be added to indicate the account.

A cosmetic change I didn’t care for related to Lightning is the buttons to switch to calendar or task views.  In TB2, there were large icons for Calendar, Task and Email that sat in the lower left and switched the main window contents.  Now, much smaller Calendar and Task icons sit in the upper right.  Clicking one opens it in a tab.  I don’t mind the tab arrangement, but I preferred the larger, more obvious buttons of the previous version.

All of my TB addons needed updating to work with TB3 except for Buttons!.  The existing version of it was supposed to work with TB3, and it seems that it does.  However, I decided that I’d disable it because I wasn’t using it.  Upon disabling it, the File, View and Edit pull down menus disappeared.  Actually, the menu’s were still there but the words disappeared, so I just had to remember which was which and click in an empty space.  Some of the choices within the menu’s went blank too.  Re-enabling Buttons! brought the menus back.  As I was preparing this post, TB3.0.1 became available.  With it loaded I was able to remove Buttons! without losing the menus.

A new Archive feature moves selected tiles into a yearly subfolder.  A bug in that was corrected in TB3.0.1 which had been archiving messages into the wrong year if messages from more than one year were selected.