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Are you a Mozilla Thunderbird user who lives in an area that observes Daylight Savings Time? Is your computer running a Windows operating system with FAT or FAT32 formatted drives? If so, chances are you may have experienced problems with Thunderbird since the change from Daylight Savings Time went in to effect earlier this month. A long standing bug that causes severe performance issues and has existed in various stages of the Mozilla project now known as Thunderbird continues to plague users despite having a history of bug reports that have been filed via Bugzilla, Mozilla’s online bug reporting tool.
Users experiencing this bug state that when they initially open Thunderbird, their Inbox shows nothing, staying blank as the application says that it is checking for new e-mail messages. Users closing the application and re-opening it find that it displays the status as "Rebuilding", eventually reloading, but taking 2 minutes or more to do so. They also report that whenever Thunderbird is open their computer becomes very sluggish and unresponsive.
Several users have reported that compacting their folders and removing all old messages from their Inbox may provide a solution to these symptoms, while still others have reported having to delete corrupted .msf files from their Thunderbird profile, then re-open Thunderbird and perform the compact routine. While these options my provide relief for frustrated users, they hardly qualify as a solution to the problem.
When contacted for input on the issue, a Mozilla spokesperson said that with 35 languages across 3 supported platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac) the list of bugs suspected and reported via the Bugzilla reporting and tracking tool can sometimes be massive. The spokesperson went on to state that while the Bugzilla lists can often be overwhelming, a significant number of submitted reports often times just don’t contain enough information to be of assistance when it comes to tracking down a particular problem. As I witnessed myself, there are pages of comments on this bug alone, and many of them contain no technical information to assist the developers, but merely contain frustrated comments such as “this was broke back in version x.xx and it’s still broken, when will it be fixed.” While it is understandable that posts like that are submitted by users who are at the time, frustrated with the situation, it is also true that they provide no value whatsoever to the bug tracking process. The Mozilla spokesperson also stated that of those issues reported, first priority has and will always be security issues, and then issues that are more widespread and have the potential to disrupt the usefulness of the product to the most users, which is understandable.
In the end, this bug has existed for quite some time, and Mozilla is aware of it. However it only rears its ugly head twice a year, at the change to and from Daylight Savings Time, and coupled with the fact that not everyone observes Daylight Savings Time, it just doesn’t get enough attention from the end user to warrant investing a lot of time and resources in to fixing, at least not in the current release of the software. The Mozilla spokesperson did say that v1.5 is due out in this quarter, which is rapidly drawing to a close, and that Release Candidate 1 would be released very soon. With so many changes in this new version including some significant security enhancements such as anti-phising protection, the spokesperson said that it is possible that this issue may become a non-issue once v1.5 is released. Will it be fixed in v1.5? We’ll keep you posted
Chris Allen and Shane Pitman for Neowin.net |
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