Thunderbird needs Conversation mode

Coming from GMail back to Thunderbird on my laptop I'm experiencing all the issues that GMail neatly fixed.

Displaying email threads in "Conversation mode", hiding top posts (see email 101). Reply to an email you've sent and the reply only goes to yourself.. not the same people in the first email.! -- it's a long list. Not even sure if Thunderbird is maintained any more, it hasn't had any new features since it was Mozilla messenger back in 2000 as far as I can see. Addons are good though ;)

Broken Apple Mail URLs

If you're getting lots of emails like me, you are bound to get one from an Apple Mail user, which means you'll suffer the broken Apple Mail bug. So that the links are not clickable, and appear mangled like:

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgwiki/index.php/
Keysigning_party_London_2008-06-02

This is one of the problems with proprietatry software, because none of the thousands of programmers who have encountered this bug have been allowed to checkin a fix to the Apple Mail source code. Had this been in Evolution or Thunderbird.. of cause it would have been fixed within hours!

Unlike this outlook bug, there is unfortunately no workaround like using <> around the URL. As a final note, Outlook also breaks URLs in the plain-text email like Apple Mail does! Time to switch to Ubuntu and Thunderbird like the rest of us?

Thunderbird attatchment bug

Anyone else noticed that Mozilla's Thunderbird can't save attachments from forwarded emails? I often get forwarded emails, they show up as attachments called "ForwardedEmail.eml" or so, and when I open them the attachments are there, but I can't get at them, doh! So I have to go back to web-based client to pull out the OOo files attached, doh! Just another case of Mozilla bugs never being fixed? I'm sure the old Mozilla 1.x suite suffered the same bug.

Google Analytics "urchin" cookie tracking

While testing my site earlier I noticed cookies called __utma, __utmb, __utmc and __utmz being set from jguk.org, what was worse was that they lasted until 23 Nov 2007, and had unique numbers in them, like 98208771.

I've found out that they orginated not from my site, but from "http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js". This was a free google service I signed up to but couldn't get anything useful out of it as it was using proprietary Adobe Flash files for its display. I already have an http://extremetracking.com/ button visible and a hit counter, so I've fallen back to using that. (These services aren't perfect though, e.g. they record screen size not current browser window size!)

I've removed the code that was setting these unreasonable cookies (practice what I preach eh?), and I suggest you all clear out your cookies from my domain, and consider if you want to clear out these __utm* cookies from other domains too. Another way of achieving the same result is to use the Customise Google extension to Firefox!

Urchin can track every single click on a webpage if the developer sets it up like that, they just add something to the onclick param of the anchor tag like this:

onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/directory/file.html");"

It could even be used to see what links people hovered over with by adding the function call to the onMouseOver param.

It's intrusive use of features like this which ruin it for the rest of us who love webpages which are javascript enabled (AJAX etc!). This is going to make people want to selectively block Javascript for certain sites, and then those sites may not function well enough.

Other sites have the same problem, take Ian Brown's Blogzilla as but one example, should anyone really be using Google urchin tracking!?

Tabbed browsing doesn't work well (yet!)

Problems with Tabbed browsing keep showing recently because websites account for their pages being tabbed.. so when I have two booking tabs open at TheTrainLine and choose my train in one tab, I go to the other tab and the train info has been lost because the other tab overwrote it! (known as a race condition)

The fix is for either websites with login and ordering process cookies and sessions to store and support multiple connections from the same user... or for browsers to neatly disguise each tab as a new session/browser instance. I favour the latter at present, as we're never going to be able to convince all website designers they should code in a way which supports tabs, and it seems neater to do it at the client side.

Personally, I really appreciate tabs for browsing reference information. However, I much prefer to have my web applications in separate windows so I can flick between them and paste text from a web page into my GMail compose window etc, and having different windows on each of my flat panels ;)

Mozilla "reply all" bug not fixed 5 years later

When I filed this Mozilla MailNews bug back in 2002 I never expected it would have been outstanding for so long. net users like me are often keen to contribute where we can to Free Software and Open Source projects, and the developers encourage us to help out where we can, so I was happy to file the bug info... It's a great feeling when you file a bug report, get an email back from a developer an hour later, and within a few days a discussion, and patch fixing the issue has been committed to the software for the next release.

Unfortunately it doesn't always work like this, and my Mozilla bug reports (I've still got loads outstanding at present) have largely never been touched by the hand of a developer -- which kind of makes we wonder if my time was well spent back in 2002? .. and raises the wider question of if developers should solicit bug reports and community involvement when there aren't the QA and developer resources to deal with that influx of requested bug reports? I think a little more upfront info would let people decide if they want to spend time contributing to something which may be never looked at, when they could be contributing their time to a project which will really make the most of the bug reports (KDE, GCC and Binutils projects spring to mind).

It's odd to think that even MS fixed IE6 and released IE7 before my bug reports got tackled. Can Mozilla Foundation really lead and beat Microsoft in the browser market when their ability to tackle bugs is so stunted? I expected more, bit of a disappointment when they fall short of what other projects achieve. Maybe it's time for a different development approach, passing on to the next generation the control of the Mozilla code-base.

This is probably one of the problems with the Free Software/Open Source bazaar development model. What gets attention is what is worthy of attention in the eyes of the developer, not a project manager who can maintain broad focus on the whole software package. Which means QA and bug triaging often get left by the way side, as they're not interesting or important enough to developers who don't have enough time as it is.

The real solution is for business backers to pay to fill in the gaps I believe, providing developers to work on documentation, and QA staff to test and triage bug reports. Distributions do this a little, but not to the extent we really need, they're largely just packagers and testing their own distros. I wonder how many companies relying on Firefox and Thunderbird have contributed coders or subsistence funds to either of those projects? At least this bug I reported to Mozilla got fixed. See this OpenOffice bug I reported on Launchpad too, got closed and never passed up to OpenOffice, which kind of defeats the purpose of Launchpad!