Why has Thunderbird turned into a turkey?
Found on The Register on Saturday, 07 August 2010
PerfProtector highlights two factors for the stress Thunderbird 3 imposes on a PC. One is that version 3, unlike version 2, downloads the full contents of IMAP folders by default.
The other is that it then creates a full text index of the material, but does so very inefficiently. Gmail seems to provide a perfect storm, as folders are downloaded several times.
Back in June we pointed out that the version 3.1 beta was noticeably faster, it that 1GB of RAM is now recommended, with 768MB as a system minimum.
That's why I don't upgrade. My ancient version of Thunderbird suits my email needs just fine. I don't really see any reason to waste disk space, RAM and CPU power with the latest version when I still will be doing the same. If one day my old version will not work anymore for whatever reason I most likely will switch to another client; probably Sylpheed/Claws. Especially the Perl plugin for Claws is tempting. Mozilla should concentrate on the core functions to deliver a lightweight and fast application (think of uTorrent) and put everything else into plugins which can come with the install, but can be disabled/removed. Need IMAP? Get the plugin. Need HTML emails? Get the plugin. Need full-text search? You get the idea.