I can only agree. The tradtional kmail address book is a pain to use and 
should have been faded out before KDE-2. The KAB frontend is better, but 
still far behind abbrower IMO. abbrowser offers everything you need for an 
adressbook application is easy to use and integrates well into kmail. We 
should really make it the default for KDE-2.2 and get rid of the other 
variants. 

It is IMO _very_ important, that the default settings of applications (even 
if they still offer other alternatives) point to the implementation of a 
certain feature (in this case an addressbook), that provides the best 
solution for the problem, and not default to some mostly useless 
implementation.

Cheers,
Lars

On Friday 11 May 2001 17:41, Matthias Elter wrote:
> Hi
>
> I think it is time to agree on a default address book frontend for KDE. We
> got bad reviews from journalists (see recent c't article on KMail) that are
> not able to find our modern address book frontends. Only a small percentage
> of our users seem to know that modern address book frontends for KDE exist.
>
> In my opinion the main reason for this disappointing situation is KMails
> default address book setting.
>
> KMail users can choose from four different address book frontends:
>
> - Traditional KMail
> - Traditional KMail using the KAB backend
> - KAB
> - Abbrowser
>
> The problem is that many users don't know about this setting hidden deep in
> the KMail configuration dialog. Even journalists fail to notice it with the
> consequence of bad reviews because of the default "Traditional KMail"
> address book interface.
>
> IMHO it is embarrasing to ship KMail with "Traditional KMail" enabled as
> default address book frontend.
>
> I propose to:
>
> - move abbrowser from kdepim to a central kde module like kdebase
> - get rid of the classic kab frontend in kdeutils
> - make abbrowser the default frontend for KMail
>
> Greetings,
> Matthias