A Posteriori

I just downloaded the Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha for Mac, hoping and praying for something good enough to make me ditch Mail.app. Needless to say, it didn’t measure up.

If any Mozilla fans doubt my impartiality, I’ll have them note that I use Firefox instead of Safari because I believe Firefox to be the more functional of the two browsers. I believe in using the best tool for the job, no matter who makes it.

Despite the fact that I go way out of my way to use Thunderbird on my Windows box at work instead of the HelpDesk supported Outlook, that program just doesn’t measure up to Mail.app. This is despite the fact that Mail.app has some really annoying (but not fatal) flaws:

1) Stupid keyboard shortcuts (Command-Shift-D to send mail WHAT?!?)
2) Non-existent keyboard shortcuts (like navigating to the very first or very last message in my folder)
3) Lack of smileys/emoticons
4) Lack of message thread view
5) Lack of bullet-point options (not so much useful for personal messages, but critical for work-related messages).

Despite these deficiencies, Mail.app is light years ahead of Thunderbird, as Thunderbird is severely lacking in the following areas:

1) More intelligent use of real estate for buttons, especially the centering of the functional icons (instead of left-justifying them). Still, I admit that Thunderbird’s use of real estate has improved dramatically in 2.0.
2) “Account Settings” separate from “Preferences”. Mail.app has a tab within preferences, which I can access by pressing Command-Comma. I don’t want to have to hunt in the menu bar for a separate dialogue. This is retarded!
3) “Tags”. The labels functionality pre-2.0 was absolutely brain-dead with only five hard-coded labels. Now they’ve given you a simple dialogue to add custom “tags”, which basically comprise of a name and a foreground colour. There is only “add” and “delete” without “edit”. Apple’s labels functionality is integrated in the mail filters functionality, which allows you to apply labels in either background or foreground colour.
4) “Message Filters” separate from “Preferences”. I may be repeating myself from 2), but this is just doubly stupid. Why shouldn’t my filters be in my preferences, a mere click of a couple of keystrokes away?
5) Pop-up dialogues don’t respond to keyboard input. I know this is because Thunderbird is written in Carbon, and not Cocao, but after years of using Windows I’m used to prompts reacting to my keyboard.
6) Lack of integration into the Mac addressbook. Windows and Linux don’t have global addressbooks, but OS X does. Mac Thunderbird should have an option to hook into a global OS addressbook, if applicable.

Unless they’ve withheld half of the finalized features from alpha version of 2.0, I think I’ll stick with Apple Mail for the foreseeable future.