Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by jklinger410 » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:17 PM UTC

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.

It also doesn't seem to make any sense to me....

>Firefox and Thunderbird have lived with competing demands for some time now

But we mashed Pocket into Firefox because we think some weird non-bookmarking bookmarking (non)solution is more important for browsing the internet than viewing emails.

>At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird.

Not many people use Thunderbird so we don't want to fix it anymore.

>These competing demands are not good for either project.

They're built on identical platforms but we just don't want to maintain Thunderbird.

>Engineers working on Thunderbird must focus on keeping up and adapting Firefox’s web-driven changes. Engineers working on Firefox and related projects end up considering the competing demands of Thunderbird, and/or wondering if and how much they should assist Thunderbird. Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it.

We don't care or think about Thunderbird when developing Firefox. Firefox is our main priority and we let Seabird die a pathetic death a long time ago so why pretend to develop anything besides just a web browser?

>“Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it”

We don't want to develop Thunderbird anymore.

I could keep paraphrasing but it's basically just "gmail rawks" over and over and over again in different words.

It's sad but basically someone needs to fork Thunderbird as it is now (FossaMail, anyone?) and just run with it from there. The beauty of Open-Source is that now the community can maintain it's own email client. If you don't want a web-based client apparently that's going to be the only way to view your emails and also not want to kill yourself going forward.

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

#82

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

mverwijs wrote: post #25

Anyone know how this impacts the e-mail functionality of Seamonkey? (I've actually started using Seamonkey again on a whim. The last couple of weeks. Somehow, browsing feels more snappy with Seamonkey than with Firefox.)

I use SeaMonkey purely for its newsgroup support. It's a lightweight and practical piece of software.

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

#83

Post by PhantomGremlin » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:20 PM UTC

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…

But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, anything helps.

They're starving over at Mozilla. They took in a mere $323 million in 2014. How can you expect them to properly fund multiple projects on such a pittance?

/sarcasm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650325

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

#84

Post by SSLy » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #65

pmelendez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good thing (I think) of a generalist is that one is used to adapt, but yeah... it gets boring sometime. Although after a while, is interesting to see how we reinvent wheels and show them with a new fancy name, it is a pattern that you would see more or less each 10 years. Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's.

> Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's. Reading up on the capabilities of early mainframes is eye-opening if you (like me) grew up on Pentiums.

Could you recommended an overview?

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

#85

Post by ath0 » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

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.

I feel the complete opposite about this -- it's a really good example of management not just making a conceptual decision but diving into the details and making a call, but with respect for all involved. Note that: * The chairperson joins in and speaks with authority. This isn't a VP of eng making a call about two repos. * It's not a binary decision - "cancel development, fire the people affected, leave the product to wither on the vine" - but a nuanced one: don't make decisions that make Firefox worse, I don't pretend to have all the details but will give you an example of one decision that I have an opinion on and who you should look to for advice (the platform and infrastructure teams) * Recognizes that it's not just a technical call but has legal and community issues, and tells you who will be sorting those out as well.

Management is hard -- you can't just make a blunt statement and expect people to fall in line, especially in open-source projects. Would you have preferred a harder line? Do you think that would've been better for the community in the long run?

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

#86

Post by jeffdubin » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

joonoro wrote: post #27

Funny I should see this today, I spent yesterday afternoon reading articles about Thunderbird and other mail clients and ended up migrating from Thunderbird to mu4e [0] (purely for reasons of usability). If this is true (and there is some reason to doubt it, as this isn't the first time Thunderbird has been declared "dead"), and considering that Geary is no longer in active development either (maybe the Elementary OS…

Mailpile looks interesting, but the Mac package is unavailable: "Packages are being reworked". That makes me think twice -- and I'm not even a Mac user. Though I'd rather see a pulled release than a dangerous one, it's been like that for at least a couple of months now.

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

#87

Post by SSLy » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #49

jonathonf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (Atom, VSCode etc etc). That's their world, that's what they like. An entire generation now exists, who learnt to code from web scripting rather than C or BASIC. They have taken over. It's just how it is. They could still be doing it wrong.

Dude, you're likely typing on the "wrong" keyboard layout and use a "wrong" calendar... convention trumps correctness pretty much all the time. What matters is that enough people are doing it to make it "the way". I fully expect that we will eventually see a Javascript OS, because "it's so much easier to maintain".

gotta leave this here: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

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

#88

Post by castell » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

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…

I welcome a Servo based browser with an HTML UI.

An one-page email app running on Servo that is inspired by GMails interface would be great.

At the moment I use Thunderbird, Outlook 2010 and GMail. Outlook has good calendar integration and GMail the better tagging, search function and UX.

Opera 12 had an inbuilt HTML+JS based email client. Moving to Chrome/Blink with Opera 15 they stopped shipping the inbuilt email client.

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

#89

Post by bigquestion » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

pmelendez wrote: post #61

creshal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The only good thing (I think) of a generalist is that one is used to adapt, but yeah... it gets boring sometime. Although after a while, is interesting to see how we reinvent wheels and show them with a new fancy name, it is a pattern that you would see more or less each 10 years. Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's.

So this generation is rewriting everything that was made and working in the 90s. Was everything written in the 90s also a rehash of stuff from the 70s/80s? Just curious, what was the equivalent of HTML/CSS/JS in the 80s?

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

#90

Post by bad_user » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

crististm wrote: post #48

bad_user wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're implying. Mozilla stopped developing Thunderbird since 2012. I would also be curios in what corporation (singular) is developing Linux.

I'm implying that "open source-ness" is not necessarily _the_ ingredient that will save a massive abandoned project. You need also 'drive' - and good hackers are put of by massive corporate projects. They have better things to do than clean up corporate mess.

Open source, mostly defined by the right to fork, is a prerequisite for the survival of abandoned projects. You can say that abandoned open-source projects don't necessarily survive, but for proprietary projects abandonment is a guaranteed death sentence.

I've also started to resent the word "hacker", because it sounds as some kind of social class made up of special snowflakes. If the project has value and users, then interested programmers will find a way to keep the project going and there are hundreds of projects in the Linux ecosystem that survive because of volunteers or companies scratching an itch. If there isn't interest, then surely the project might as well die. But that's a tautology.