Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 443 posts

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

#131

Post by tormeh »

creshal wrote: post #39
krisdol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

God, I hope the Unix people abandon C and start using Rust. It's going to raise the quality of open source desktop applications so much. Or, well, it'll at least be the first clear improvement in many decades.

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

#132

Post by peferron »

andresmanz wrote: post #80
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.

Same here, I'm 26. The industry has changed a lot when people realized you could make a shitload of money with the web/scripting stuff. Coding schools, open source communities and huge companies love HTML and JavaScript and Python and Ruby for their simplicity. Just take a bunch of people, tell them they could make a lot of money by learning some dead simple languages and there you go. Doesn't matter if they write th…

Yes! JS, Python and Ruby are just "dead simple" "scripting" languages that only serve to "make a shitload of money" and aren't "real programming".

Real programmers (like me) use C.

Seriously, no. Just no.

And if I wanted to prevent people from writing "the most disastrous code in the whole universe", teaching C instead of JS would be much, much lower in the list than teaching how to split code into modules/libraries, write testable code, etc.

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

#133

Post by smacktoward »

silon7 wrote: post #101
simpleigh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ah, but maintaining XUL means working on old code (which is boring), but moving Firefox to HTML means working on new shiny code (which is exciting). https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Killing XUL has the potential of killing Firefox. I bet the last good XUL version will be forked.

And then the person who forked it gets to maintain it!

Lucky them.

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

#134

Post by hmokay »

creshal wrote: post #114
Kunix wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

JavaScript programmers are truly delusional sometimes.

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

#135

Post by masklinn »

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.

> Being nonstandard is completely irrelevant here.

It's relevant in that much of the work has to be duplicated (documentation but also layout implementation & the like) and none of the new and improved web development tools can be used for XUL.

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

#136

Post by hmokay »

peferron wrote: post #132
andresmanz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I'm 26. The industry has changed a lot when people realized you could make a shitload of money with the web/scripting stuff. Coding schools, open source communities and huge companies love HTML and JavaScript and Python and Ruby for their simplicity. Just take a bunch of people, tell them they could make a lot of money by learning some dead simple languages and there you go. Doesn't matter if they write th…

Yes! JS, Python and Ruby are just "dead simple" "scripting" languages that only serve to "make a shitload of money" and aren't "real programming". Real programmers (like me) use C. Seriously, no. Just no. And if I wanted to prevent people from writing "the most disastrous code in the whole universe", teaching C instead of JS would be much, much lower in the list than teaching how to split code into modules/libraries,…

Well, at least when you program C the community is a lot better. Ruby and JS people can be truly cringey sometimes.

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

#137

Post by mhb »

perlwle wrote: post #51
mhb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing The forwarding/replying in plain vs. formatted text is pretty annoying.

Press shift + reply / forward in thunderbird. Is that what you want?

That is what I use, but now I can't remember/recreate what I didn't like about it.

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

#139

Post by yeukhon »

micampe wrote: post #100
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's all open source right? You are not the first person I see complaining about losing XUL, why is no one forking it instead of just making sarcastic comments? I thought that was the whole point of open source, that when the original maintainer loses interest the community takes over. You even say in another comment that the effort is not very big (I don't know, never seen the code) so why not?

You have to build the entire pipeline again. I am not sure if Mozilla is even in the interest of keeping TB build infrastructure around.

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

#140

Post by Kunix »

creshal wrote: post #114
Kunix wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a user, my experience with HTML/CSS/JS apps is great. Look at the excellent feedback the Atom Editor is getting.

As a developer, I feel that it's easier for me to create good user experience (nice UI, easy non-blocking I/Os by default, etc).

I don't say it's flawless, I say it's now becoming a very good alternative.

Post reply on HN