Bug of the moment 2007-04-22

Thunderbird 2 is finally out. It appears to be a kitschy makeover instead of a massive bug fix version, although it does have a couple of small tweaks. Dragging items from one address book to another now moves the card instead of copying it, as you would expect. Closing a draft e-mail window now prompts you whether you want it saved, regardless of whether it was automatically saved. If you respond in the negative, the auto-save copy is tossed away.

Most of the bugs and flaws remain, such as extremely laggish operation, duplicate address cards in Collected Addresses (all the people already in your address book still end up in there), flaky text editing, and an e-mail content editor that is still not a patch on Outlook Express. Like Firefox, it doesn’t bother to check your Windows version and mimic it, so I had to screw around reverting its simulacrum to continue to resemble Windows 2000 instead of XP.

The new oversized toasters also belie far more convincingly the confusion that exists within the program as to what exactly constitutes new e-mail:

The top count is the number of new messages at this most recent check, but the list of messages includes all new messages from this and all previous checks. I just wish that the two parts of the toaster window agreed with each other. Oh, and didn’t show me messages I’d already seen.

Posted 22nd April 2007 – Comments and questions?