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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

#121

Post by pmelendez »

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.

>Reading up on the capabilities of early mainframes is eye-opening if you (like me) grew up on Pentiums.

Close enough... I grew up on XTs, i286, i386, so on :) All of them way weaker than my phone (Not sure if that was what you were referring to).

However, in terms of architecture, algorithms, programming language features... It feels like we haven't advanced too much. Actually, the opposite... we are encourage now to do not be too clever on programming because processing power and memory usage is close to be a commodity and clean code is more important (which is fine but less fun).

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

#122

Post by mmahemoff »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #83
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

Which would be a ton of cash for most applications, but this is a web browser and they are in direct competition with not just one, but several, of the biggest companies in the world. Here are their 2014 revenues: $86 billion (MS), $182 billion, $66 billion. Budgets for the other browsers aren't clearly defined, but we do know it's a big focus for all the manufacturers and they each have major incentives to keep users inside their own ecosystem.

Even just keeping up with all the standards, and contributing to them, is an enormous undertaking at this point in the web's evolution. Let alone UI design, devtools, porting to mobile OSs, etc.

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

#123

Post by hunvreus »

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 spent a good deal of time dealing with XUL, heck I even helped with the French community. Designing UI was a ton more robust with it than with HTML, but XULrunner was (and still is from what I saw) not the most pleasant beast to run.

I'm not advocating a rewrite for the sake of novelty, but they're part of a product life cycle.

You mentioned that it would mean dropping some features. I think that's a good thing; an opportunity to cut the fat and make sure only what is proven and useful makes its way back into Firefox.

You seem to think volunteers won't pick up the maintenance of Thunderbird; if so then why should Mozilla care about it?

Now, I don't think HTML, CSS and JS are the best technologies. They each suck in their own way. But they are winning, and Mozilla is merely embracing that.

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

#124

Post by castell » 

  [...] Thunderbird, the free email, chat and news client 
  it first developed in 2004 [...]
In 2004 Thunderbird spun off the Mozilla Suite (Browser, Mail, WYSIWYG HTML editor, IRC-chat client), like Firefox.

And Mozilla Suite is based itself on Netscape Suite, that AOL donated as open source code and formed the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla was the internal codename of Netscape).

The Netscape Suite was a complete rewrite of Netscape Navigator 4. That long rewrite phase and the choosen technology (XUL, XPCOM, etc) contributed to loosing the Browser war agaist IE 5/6.

Thunderbird barely changed since 2004. Back then it was a direct competitor to Outlook Express.

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

#125

Post by Yetanfou »

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.)

The demise of Thunderbird does not mean anything to Seamonkey, but the deprecation of XUL will make it hard to continue to develop it since the whole user interface is based on XUL. The only viable option would be to pick up maintenance for the XUL-supporting Gecko engine.

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

#126

Post by bigquestion »

toyg wrote: post #99
bigquestion wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In a way, yes. If you look at OS interfaces from the '80s and compare them with modern ones, you'll see a lot of cpu power is now spent on eye-candy but functionally they're not terribly different. Except they're all built on C++, whereas before they were in C or lower-level languages. OO was the HTML/CSS/JS of the '90s.

Could all the large software applications of today have been created without OOP, just on functional programming paradigms? If OOP was beneficial 10 years on, maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications.

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

#127

Post by jacquesm »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #107
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Thunderbird has been my email client ever since I used unix as my day-to-day platform and it's a real pity that Mozilla stops maintenance but on the whole it doesn't need that much maintenance. It just works, I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing. Just keep it as it is and I'm perfectly ok with it. If mozilla did the same with FireFox a and would focus on long t…

> If mozilla did the same with FireFox a and would focus on long term stability and bug fixing rather than grafting new parts onto it and re-writing old parts that are working just fine I'd be OK with that too. Although I agree 100% with the sentiment, the trouble with this approach is that the web moves much quicker than email.

It is my opinion - which is not shared by many, I'm aware of that - that the web is moving too fast. This is why we're dealing with massive data leaks and unreliable services on a daily basis. If the quality of desk top software in the 80's and the 90's had been as bad as the quality of your average consumer website (my bank for instance) then the PC revolution would have never happened.

I'm all for a slower pace with a much stronger focus on quality.

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

#128

Post by meshko »

reboog711 wrote: post #111
meshko wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alb…

To be clear -- it is in fact much better than I expected as well and we all appreciate the work that you are doing on it.

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

#129

Post by realusername »

emidln wrote: post #116
espadrine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem as I understand is more about the documentation, the hidden quirks and also the barrier to bring new contributors to the source code. It's always easier when they don't have to learn a custom language first.

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

#130

Post by scrollaway »

emidln wrote: post #116
espadrine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much as i despise HTML UIs (see reasoning my rant below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655606), it is relevant and XUL is horrible.

I'm glad to see it disappear, it's one of those things the world doesn't need. A failed experiment. And an HTML UI for firefox makes sense in the long run.

Fun fact of the day: Did you know XUL uses DTD to store translations? That's right, if you have a string you want to translate, you just have to create a new XML element in a localized DTD file. Isn't that just a wonderful idea.

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