Web QA gets Badges!

ted wrote on December 10, 2013 at 8:45 am:

1. I have just gone through a process of trying to find a fix or workaround for a bug which dates back at least to 2009, wherein a clean install of Thunderbird fails to contact the POP3 server to retrieve mail. I counted at least six different threads on the mozillazine website dating back to 2009, wherein the same irrelevant advice was offered, and in-effect, amounted to “try reinstalling from scratch”. I’ve verified that this is a bug in Thunderbird (and I’ve been an IT professional for 38 years, I know how to verify a bug). Specifically, no matter what is causing the “failure to connect” from the client point of view, the client should at a minimum report that no connection with the MTA server was made. When Thunderbird is operating properly, it attempts to find new mail to download, and if it finds none, it reports with a “no new mail” message. In this case, it simply prints a message saying it “Looked up “. I suspect (like most “failure to connect” problems) it can be easily detected, and at a minimum, report back a) the failure, and b) a guess as to the cause. This should have been fixed long ago. It’s inexcusable that it has been allowed to remain for over 4 years (just based on my survey of references to it on Google).

2. Some time ago, the development team introduced an “Account Setup Wizard” which was intended to make it easy for people to setup new accounts. Apparently, they are so sure that this ‘Wizard’ will make things easy, they made it next to impossible to turn it off, and simply configure an e-mail account manually, as millions of professionals like myself prefer to do.

The only workaround I’ve found is to temporarily set Thunderbird for ‘OffLine’, and even then, some features cannot be modified manually. Forcing this step also creates a serious problem if the configuration settings require setting alternate paths to local file storage.

It is inexcusable that this feature has no straightforward opt-out. It is an affront to every fundamental principle of open-source software that the stewards of this code refuse to allow users to disable their so-called ‘Wizard’ and configure accounts the way they want to. We can of course go into the configuration profiles and modify them ourselves, by trial and error. It is outrageous that we should be forced to do that, when an opt-out of the automatic configuration is such a trivially easy to implement and obvious prerequisite under any rational standard of software design.

3. I am currently using Thunderbird version 8.0, in part because I learned over time that new releases almost always meant more new bugs, and very few fixes of existing bugs. Just yesterday, I decided to try upgrading to 24.0, and that ended with a complete waste of 2 hours, and an e-mail client unable to retrieve incoming mail. If Mozilla isn’t going to support this product, perhaps they (you) should announce that fact, and find someone willing to take over support. As it stands now, I can no longer recommend using this software to clients.

4. To add insult to injury, both Firefox and Thunderbird engage in a practice of periodically “nagging” users to upgrade their versions. These messages can’t be turned off, and on several occasions, when I’ve been running a lengthy screen-capture to video process, I’ve returned to a machine only to realize the video capture has been ruined because a Thunderbird modal window advising me to upgrade to a newer version has popped up on the screen and overlapped the area being captured. What part of “No I don’t want to upgrade…” do your software developers not understand? Why should I have to answer this question 3 or 4 times a day?

Bottom-line, I wonder who, if anyone, at mozilla.org is responsible for allowing these slipshod practices to continue? I could give you similar stories about the development of Firefox, which routinely invalidates 3rd-party add-ons (the main reason for it’s success, BTW), and nags for upgrades as well. Mozilla has gone from being one of the great initiatives in the history of this industry, to a toxic, self-impressed unresponsive organization which most resembles Microsoft, the company that created the demand for Mozilla in the first place.

Could someone at least answer that question? Who is the person who is supposed to make sure Mozilla fulfills it’s original mission? Can I have a name, a phone-number and an e-mail address, please?