Comment 39 for bug 1347305

:aceman's comments from bug 960672 (which apparently introduced this change) seem relevant, and match my own sentiments fairly well. I don't see any response to them there; were they discussed elsewhere, or just not taken into account?

For myself, I find this change highly aggravating. I've finally managed to get all the parts of the TB2 UI which I found essential restored, and when they finally make it into a release version, that version has *another* new undesirable-to-me UI change with no apparent way to effectively revert it...

I really hope some way (whether userChrome.css or add-on or something else) can be found to 100% restore the old UI in this regard, at least visually, because I really don't want to stay on Thunderbird 2 for another year or more; I wanted to move off of it more than a year ago, in point of fact. The screenshots I've seen of the userChrome changes proposed so far don't seem entirely satisfactory; I haven't had the time to dig through the patch that made the change and see what might be required to just revert it wholesale, but I'm not entirely confident of that being a productive approach, since I don't know of any way in CSS to *remove* a style rather than overriding it with a different one. (Doing it in JS, via an extension, doesn't seem likely to be much easier.)

Also, just to note, in regard to comment 19:

* Thanks for explaining the rationale behind the change. Shouldn't that have been included in the original bug?

* I disagree that this makes things look nicer. IMO this looks considerably worse.

* Although most of the features you described as upcoming do indeed sound cool, I don't want "one field, with multiple addresses per line". I've seen that in Outlook, and while it has an advantage in information density, it's also harder to read and harder to work with IMO than the discrete separation of one address per line.