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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

#111

Post by reboog711 »

meshko wrote: post #75
puppetmaster3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when Adobe abandoned Flash? Apache: http://flex.apache.org

Flex is not Flash and Apache Flex distribution is not exactly a poster child of abandoneware surviving as an OSS project. Apache Flex releases are infrequent, not bug free and generally smell of death.

Apache Flex has seen more success than I expected it too. The Mailing list traffic makes it one of the busiest projects in the Apache Foundation and it has had 7 major releases [if I'm counting right] since it got donated.

I wasn't aware of any bugs in new releases; but I know lots of legacy bugs have been fixed; plus lots of new components and other code has been donated.

Its ties to Adobe Flash Player may be an albatross, but the FlexJS project has done impressive things.

[Disclaimer: I am an Apache Flex PMC Member and all this is my opinion/perception; I do not speak on behalf of the Apache Foundation or the Apache Flex PMC]

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

#112

Post by baldfat »

cubano wrote: post #47
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.

Stick around for another 25 like I have...the fun is just starting!

I still get mad when people talk bad about Fortran and replacing the code with some slow solution. The power of CPU and cheap RAM has caused the world to favor the hand holding of developers.

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

#113

Post by scrollaway »

Kunix wrote: post #91
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.

I am 29, started coding at 14, I've built UIs based on mIRC Scripting, VB/Winforms, C++/Qt, C#/WPF, Java/Android layouts. Using IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Qt Creator and Android Studio. I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that: - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Component…

You also forget:

- There are far fewer native components, leaving accessibility down to the developer of the app and making it nonexistant.

- Platform integration is impossible, which means there is no way for the framework, for example, to create widgets differently on OS X, Windows or Linux (these platforms have many different conventions)

- Theming globally becomes impossible. If you want to write a dark theme for your desktop, you go from writing a theme once for GTK and once for Qt to once for each and every app you run. Uuuurgh.

But only supporting one rendering engine, yay! Much better than the 6 different engines we have to support in Qt (huh?).

And having access to all the latest JS additions! ... that were copied from other languages you could develop desktop apps in, because JS is a terrible hack.

And relying on native Node.js modules, yay! As opposed to native modules for literally every other better language out there.

I'm not sure what you're actually comparing this workflow to. Maybe one day writing HTML apps will be great, but today is not that day. Today, writing HTML apps is only beginning to be an idea that doesn't completely suck. But for the user, it does massively suck. Massive apps that ship their own copy of webkit/blink/whathaveyou, with security flaws that won't get patched, disgusting performance on low-end hardware, atrocious battery usage and decades of UX knowledge thrown out of the window just because the app developer doesn't have the knowledge to see it.

I don't look forward to this. And I'm younger than you.

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

#114

Post by creshal »

Kunix wrote: post #91
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.

I am 29, started coding at 14, I've built UIs based on mIRC Scripting, VB/Winforms, C++/Qt, C#/WPF, Java/Android layouts. Using IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Qt Creator and Android Studio. I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that: - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Component…

> - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Components/ES6/CSS3 features. - You can rely on native Node.js modules when needed.

So, developer convenience trumps user experience? Who cares about your battery run time, how hot your PC runs, the bandwidth overhead, the massive attack surface from all the useless components shipped, how badly the webapp integrates into your OS, as long as we can ship faster and faster?

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

#115

Post by danellis »

icebraining wrote: post #108
danellis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't, because you can't write an OS in JavaScript; you need native code. Maybe a desktop environment or something, but not an OS.

All languages can be compiled to native code, it's just harder for some. For example, here's an AOT compiler for JS: https://github.com/tmikov/jscomp

It's still a scripting language, and you still can't write an OS in it. There's no low-level access to the hardware. You could of course write all the low level parts in C, but then you haven't written an OS in JavaScript.

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

#116

Post by emidln »

espadrine wrote: post #103
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…

XUL was a weight on developing for Firefox. It worked like HTML, but was nonstandard. At first, it meant they could quickly implement things like flexbox ( / ) and gridlayout ( ) long before they were a thing in CSS. But as HTML and CSS slowly got more features than XUL, XUL development slowed down, up to the point where writing the Firefox UI in XUL became a pain because of poor tooling and sneaky bugs. More and mor…

> It worked like HTML, but was nonstandard.

Being nonstandard is completely irrelevant here. Firefox's UI doesn't need to be rendered by Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

castell wrote: post #104
creshal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, especially the MULTICS operating system was so advanced and dozens of decades ahead that we still borrow from its concepts. It had for example 16 security rings. Intel CPUs support only 4 CPU rings, and Windows e.g. uses only 2 rings (for kernel mode and user mode) (hypervisor mode uses another ring in recent iterations).

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by ausjke »

Sad to hear, Thunderbird has been my major and actually sole email client for a few years, not a Windows user so outlook is out, do I have to use mutt from now on?

On Android I use K-9 which works well, it seems for Desktop the web email will be my only choice, not good at all.

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

#119

Post by feedjoelpie »

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…

>So when the crappy HTML Firefox shows up, with way less features than the Firefox of today, remember that this (Thunderbird) was one of the things given up to have it.

Please recall that Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was born as a lightweight, fast alternative to the bloat of Netscape Communicator/Mozilla Suite. Dropping features from an old bloated application is what launched Firefox to fame in the first place.

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

#120

Post by tedunangst »

danellis wrote: post #98
dspillett wrote: post #94

Your link redirects people to a "no hotlinking" image when used directly. For those affected: if you find the page in Google by searching for "The CADT Model" it does let you see the content via that route.

What is the point of that?

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