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Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

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Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#31

Post by crististm »

bad_user wrote: post #5

Thunderbird is still being actively developed by the community. I'm on version 42 beta and it's looking good. This is what open source is about. It doesn't matter if the parent no longer wants to maintain it. As long as there is interest, the product survives.

You've been brainwashed about the "community" stuff. Mozilla _is_ a corporation. Linux is built by a corporation. Last time I checked, less than 18% of Linux patches were from independent contributors.

Everything big enough to be known by Joe average hobbyist is built by a corporation.

Let's see the community in action taking the lead when Mozilla drops the ball.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#32

Post by haddr »

Cyph0n wrote: post #2

That's really sad to hear. It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. The best solution imo is to just let the community take over.

Geary email client is a really quite nice and fresh alternative recently. Although not that advanced and mature, but a pleasure to use...

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#33

Post by ZenoArrow »

toyg wrote: post #22
betteringred wrote: post #17

They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (l…

It happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks…

> "You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS"

Why is that crazy? Makes perfect sense to me, especially as the performance of the programming language element improves. Ultimately these IDEs are sure to make use of WebAssembly, which should take away the remaining performance concerns.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#34

Post by creshal »

toyg wrote: post #22
betteringred wrote: post #17

They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (l…

It happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks…

> You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing

I'm 25 and I feel to old for this industry already.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#35

Post by Cyph0n »

jvehent wrote: post #8
Cyph0n wrote: post #2

That's really sad to hear. It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. The best solution imo is to just let the community take over.

> The best solution imo is to just let the community take over. ... which is exactly what is being proposed here, with financial help from the Mozilla Foundation to ease the transition.

As far as I read in the linked article, nothing has been finalized yet from Mozilla's side.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#36

Post by bshimmin »

parennoob wrote: post #21
bshimmin wrote: post #16

The announcement from Mitchell Baker really is corporate drivel at its worst: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc... This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of signing and encrypting emails.

If you think that's corporate drivel at its worst, you haven't seen much corporate drivel. What's so bad about it? She is diplomatically trying to say, "Hey, we don't have the money or resources necessary to support Thunderbird, we're probably going to abandon it". Open Source may be well and good but the engineers at Mozilla still have to earn money for their families. Look at the Corporation's Financial Statements…

It's long, it's rambling, it uses phrases like "laser-focussed" (twice). Fine, it's not corporatese at its absolute worst (there isn't a "synergistic" in there), but it's also not going to win any awards for clear communication; it could be every bit as diplomatic whilst also losing about 70% of the words.

I hope this isn't the end for Thunderbird.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#37

Post by petercooper »

betteringred wrote: post #17

They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (l…

When you take an app that's been worked on for 15 or so years and then replace it's UI you're going to lose a TON of features. They'll slowly reintroduce some of the most popular features (hamburger menu will be priority #1!) but there will be a TON that they will not reintroduce. Why?

Hmm, that's how Firefox (then Phoenix) started in the first place in comparison to the bloated Mozilla Application Suite.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#38

Post by betteringred »

toyg wrote: post #22
betteringred wrote: post #17

They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (l…

It happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks…

I'm all for writing new apps in HTML, I think Atom and VSCode are awesome, but I'm not for rewriting huge legacy apps to be HTML apps for no good reason. The reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers don't enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain XUL is less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML.

No one has listed the ten awesome features that we're going to get from HTML Firefox (cause there ain't many) or the 1,000 features (tons of little details) that will be lost. If users listed their 10 biggest problems with Firefox I doubt any of them would be solved by moving to HTML.

Imagine if instead of writing VSCode from scratch and releasing it alongside Visual Studio Microsoft had rewritten the Visual Studio UI in HTML, abandoned all the nonessential features, and abandoned the old native Visual Studio.

One might say that Mozilla will wait to release the new Firefox till it has all the old features of the old Firefox, but that's not been my experience with how teams work. They'll get frustrated with the rewrite and want to get it out the door. "We can add those features later" they will say, and then they'll never get added.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#39

Post by creshal »

krisdol wrote: post #9
seszett wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. I don't know about Windows, but on Linux... I try every so often to use other clients, but Thunderbird is still the only one I can bear. For some reason there's always something that doesn't work with Gnome or KDE clients, keystore stuff that doesn't let me save my passwords, or seems to but doesn't actually remember them, or some indexation service insisting on taking h…

I'd give evolution another shot. I find it to be the only enterprise-ready one

If by "enterprise-ready" you mean "slow, bloated, and byzantine", then yes, it fits that ecosystem perfectly.

But despite being a single-threaded, half-XML-half-C cancerous pile of dirty hacks, Thunderbird is still faster and more stable – not to mention more extensible – than Evolution could ever hope to be.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#40

Post by rogeryu »

I'm using TB since two years, when Apple Mail failed to load after an OSX upgrade. I wanted to move, preparing for moving to Linux later on. I have several family members using TB on Windows. My mother used Eudora for years, I believe seven years after development stopped. It never had a problem. I could copy it to Windows 7, just copying the folder with the program files in it, and it all worked.

How big is the risk if TB development stops altogether? What security risks are there when you keep using it?

My mother cannot handle changing to something new anymore. So I guess I have to take the risk.

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