Betterbird Blog

The system tray support on Windows is pretty good in Betterbird, enhanced when compared to Thunderbird by an informative tooltip so check which folders contain new or unread mail:

Betterbird on Linux delivers the same functionality: System tray support, informative tooltip, minimise to tray, "tray icon always". It's all described in this section of our Expert Tips page.

We don't want to turn this post into another rant about Thunderbird, so it suffices to say that Thunderbird despite their new implementation in Rust here and here never pulled it off, their effort silently died off, and they never paid attention to a string of outstanding problems linked as dependents of this meta bug. The current state of Thunderbird affairs is that only Daily shows a permanent, fixed and pretty useless system tray icon with "Thunderbird Daily" as a tooltip - wow!

Now, with the advent of Wayland, system tray support has run into various issues:

For starters, Wayland doesn't have a concept of minimising windows, yes, you read correctly. Refer to these discussions: Gnome-Gtk and Free Desktop. Some quotes from the first reference:

Wayland does not have a concept of iconified windows.
I would suggest that we rename iconified to minimized in gtk4.
There is no minimize support in either the xdg-shell or the gtk-shell protocols; surfaces can request minimization, but ...
Plus, there's no state for minimization, which means we cannot set the state on configure, like we do for maximize/fullscreen.

Since Wayland doesn't have a concept of minimising, no minimise event is sent to a window that is being minimised, which is documented here. In Betterbird, we implemented a hack where our own code generates the missing event, when Betterbird's own control to minimise is clicked.

So it's understandable that the system controls on the system title bar don't work (reported here and here)

where as the controls drawn by Betterbird into the menu bar work:

Also not working: Clicking taskbar buttons, or pressing "minimise window" keyboard shortcuts that the window manager may offer, reported here.

To add insult to injury, there was a time when restoring a window from the system tray caused a graphics glitch, but that seems to have been fixed by changes in the Mozilla platform in Betterbird 140.

Message search in Thunderbird and Betterbird is a widely misunderstood area. Both programs offer three different searches:

• "Regular" message search, via the context menu "Search Messages..." or keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+F. This searches in a folder, all folders of an account, or all folders in all mail accounts. The latter is a recent enhancement in Betterbird. This method is also used to create "(Saved) Search Folders", which together with "Unified Folders" form the class of "Virtual Folders".
• Quick Filter Search, QF in short, which is summoned with keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+K. This search uses the same technology as message search under the hood.
• Last not least, there is "Global Search and Indexer", for short, "Gloda" (Global Database), which indexes all mail and chat message into a global SQLite database global-messages-db.sqlite. When enabled, this is summoned with keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K.

Betterbird offers many improvements in message, QF search and virtual folders:

• In message search, it offers complex search terms (and/or grouping) and regular expression search.
• In both message search and QF, diacritics are ignores, so "señor" matches "senor". Bodies of encrypted messages are also searched.
• QF offers negations (inverted buttons) and better feedback while the search is running.
• Virtual folders are fully cached: When a virtual folder is opened, it is restored from cache instead of executing the underlying search again which can lead to extreme performance degradation if the virtual folder is based on many and large folders.

Now turning our attention to Gloda. It was developed in 2009 in series of tickets and currently has 45 open bugs and enhancement requests. Since the initial developer left the project, the code is basically unmaintained, is has only received general refactoring, for example when the entire Thunderbird codebase was migrated to custom elements and ECMAScript Modules. Gloda is the only code left that still uses JavaScript Generator Functions. They have been replaced with modern asynchronous processing in the rest of the codebase. In brief: Thunderbird developers will only touch Gloda with a ten-foot pole, and the same goes for the Betterbird team. That said, our project leader had some exposure to the Gloda code, for example, when he was the Thunderbird maintainer and had to fight inadvertent changes to the tokenizer that broke Gloda completely.

Despite all the difficulties, Betterbird offers a few discrete improvements:

• Gloda search in encrypted messages
• Gloda results can immediately be opened in a list view
• Gloda skips duplicate results in Gmail's "All Mail" folder
• Preference mailnews.database.global.indexer.max_body_part_size to allow Golda to index more than the first 20 KB of a message to avoid missed search hits
• And the most recent improvement: Two new filters which allow restricting the search result to search hits which matched on message subject or message body. Fortunately, ChatGPT sprang to help to make sense of the code.

Today we're presenting fourteen features that don't exist in Thunderbird, although requests date back to 1999.

Main window:

• Like in every regular application, the menu bar is at the top of the main window. It's surprising that Thunderbird broke that rule in Supernova-Kaboom and users are now struggling with userChrome.css to get it back where it belongs.
• Equally, Supernova-Kaboom got rid of the message counts in the status bar, a UI element which had existed for more than 20 years.
• Betterbird's Windows and Linux system tray icon offer a tooltip, so you can see at a glance in which folders to find new messages.

Improvements for people who like it tidy:

• Some people want Betterbird always start on the same folder, most likely an inbox or unified inbox, no matter which folder was open when they closed the application. That's why Betterbird offers a startup folder.
• Some people open many messages in tab, but they don't want to see those messages again after a restart. That's why Betterbird offers optional tab restore.
• For people with very wide screens there are vertical tabs.
• People with many accounts appreciate Betterbird's implementation of account colours. The old add-on doesn't work any more, and Thunderbird's own implementation leaves much to be desired.

Message list, aka thread pane:

• Long before Thunderbird introduced its space-wasting cards view, Betterbird offered a multi-line view like in Outlook. Individual columns are still present, only the message subject has moved to the second line.
• Many users don't know that there is a secondary sort, that is, you can sort by one column and then by another. That why we're showing secondary sort indicators.
• Ever selected more than one message or a collapsed thread (multi-select) and wondered about the not-so-useful summary view? It can be turned off in Betterbird, so the message shown is the last selected message.

Threading improvements:

• People who use a threaded view appreciate Betterbird's connecting lines that had been used for two decades before they became another Supernova-Kaboom casualty.
• Betterbird also offers reversed threading, so when sort be date descending (newest message on top), the threads are also sorted that way.

Finally, rethreading and message editing:

• Rethreading: In a threaded view, messages can be moved to a different thread, or removed from a thread. In folders containing feed articles, these can also be grouped into threads.
• The subject and other message headers can be edited. This functionality is available via add-ons, but it's better to have it in the toolbox.

Betterbird improves your workflow and saves you time. Here are some examples from the message compose window:

1. You've been working in a document and want to send it out to a colleague? Just pick it from the Recent File(s) menu.
2. You have a Windows shortcut on your desktop to a document you want to send out? Just drag the shortcut onto the compose window, and it will attach the target file automatically.
3. You can still show attachments "on top" in the header area, as it used to be, rather than beneath the message body.
4. There is a link in the body of your message you want to check. Due to restrictions in the Mozilla platform code, you can't click on it, but you can open the link in the browser via the context menu.

Those four features don't exist in Thunderbird, although requests date back to 2005.

Add-ons are a great way to enhance the functionality of the compose window. We recommend the following:

1. Our own ThunderHTMLedit to fix some quirks in the HTML the Mozilla editor produces.
2. Signature Switch to manage and switch multiple signatures.
3. LanguageTool to check grammar and spelling.
4. QuickText to insert text blocks into your messages. We don't promote pre-canned replies, but we support reducing repetitive insertion tasks.
5. Mail Merge, if you need to stay in touch with many people.

People who have looked at Betterbird's feature table already know that Betterbird has implemented many features Thunderbird users have only been dreaming of since 1999. Here are a few highlights — and remember, Betterbird only started in 2021:

But this is not the subject of this article. We'd rather talk about some recent requests and the turnaround time until the users had a working solution:

These quick turnarounds are possible thanks to users who report issues and suggest improvements. And if something can be done, it gets done.