Granted right now Thunderbird is not as feature packed as Outlook. But Thunderbird 2 will be adding several new features such as the new message alert indicator, message tags and may be even tabs. Thunderbird 2 will also render incoming HTML e-mails via Firefox. Outlook 2007 (due out in February) on the other hand is not going to use Internet Explorer anymore to render incoming HTML E-Mails. Nope, it is going to use the MS Word rendering engine which is currently uses for creating e-mails.
So what you ask? First off, ever try to make a web page out of a Word document? The end product is not the greatest looking and the HTML source code is messy. Word has limited CSS support, so with Outlook 2007 here is what you can expect:
- No background images – Background images in divs and table cells are gone.
- Poor background color support – Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
- No support for
floatorposition– Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.- Shocking box model support – Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!
Basically, Outlook 2007 is going to be a FIVE YEAR step backwards for e-mail design. If you are a Windows Live Mail user (which sadly I am no longer), Outlook 2007 is going to very similar. Oh and if you are currently a Hotmail user, chances are Windows Live Mail will replace your existing Hotmail account. Heck, even the new Yahoo!Mail Beta is better than Outlook 2007 is going to be.
Whatever Microsoft’s reasoning is, be it consistency (since Word is used to compose), security (but they say IE is safe) or possible anti-trust issues, this change to Outlook 2007 could be very good news for Thunderbird 2.
News Source: Champaign Monitor Blog
I currently use Microsoft Office 2003 (legally, of course) and therefore Outlook 2003. But from what I’ve seen, Office 2007 isn’t going to be installed on my computer.
And this Outlook stuff certainly doesn’t make it any better, if you ask me…
What I really like about Thunderbird (it might be a Tb 2.x) feature is that I can select “Gmail”, when creating a new account. By doing this Thunderbird sets everything in place so I can use it with Gmail without having to change any server settings or anything in Thunderbird… now that’s neat!
// Lars
It’s ironic isn’t it? I find Outlook 2007 to be the 1st Outlook ever worth it’s time. I am considering dropping Thunderbird and it’s Baysean filtering (which eventually gets horribly confused) and moving to Outlook 2007 instead.
Each to his/her own.
That doesn’t neccessarily make thunderbird better. I don’t know where you got thet information but
# No background images – Background images in divs and table cells are gone.
Wrong, you are allowed to use background images in both word and outlook, you just don’t know what the feature is called you noob.
# Poor background color support – Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
Wrong, you right click on the cell go to table management and you can find that feature there
# No support for float or position – Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
Yes, in web expression (frontpage 2007) and word that feature is supported
# Shocking box model support – Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!
Again you do not know how to customize borders. Maybe try pressing F1 instead of flaming outlook. Thunderbird has a lot of problems.
Thunderbird es mejor que Outlock desde todo punto de vista, consume menos recursos y ademas posee plugin, temas… Es la misma comparacion Firefox vs IE!
In response to user “F.U”…
How can you design for a mail client that only decides what is/isn’t displayed based on it’s user preferences???
You can hardly send out an email saying “to view this email as it is intended, please go ‘tools’, ‘options’ and and enable this, disable that, and you’ll be fine” can you??
Neil Twigger
Knob!
Personally, Outlook 2003 was a lot better than the 2007, but the 2007 dose look better. So for the next outlook they need to have the functions and user friendly interface like 2003 and the look like 2007. By the way what happened to the file, edit, etc menus, this is so confusing now.
I like Thunderbird a lot better than 2007 because you can change just about everything about it, theme, calender, addons, etc. Its just a lot better.
So i would recommend Thunderbird to any one over outlook 2007.