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

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

#151

Post by agentgt » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:15 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…

This is not the first time (Mozilla aka Netscape) and it reminds me back when I first started my programming career and would read good ole Joel:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Joel was right and wrong.. Firefox was a huge success (or at least in my mind it was) but some might say the Netscape company was trashed during the process (I don't know if I agree).

Starting over isn't always a bad thing but I agree that is also highly overrated.

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

#152

Post by gist » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #127

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

"which is not shared by many"

I agree with your opinion and am one of those that shares that thought as well.

"If the quality of desk top software in the 80's and the 90's"

Exactly. And it couldn't be as bad back in the day when things had to be good simply because you didn't want to have to update by floppy (or even CD) a bunch of software with issues.

The focus on quality isn't there. It isn't there because of the safety net of being able to update people over the web. Nothing appears to be thought out in advance anymore. Maybe "no beta or alpha testing" might be an exaggeration but it just seems like "shove it out and when problems develop patch it".

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

#153

Post by Certhas » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #79

ZenoArrow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

It's crazy because, apart from performance concerns (it looks like we love to make our computers slower and slower every 10 years), you're just discarding all the features of the containing desktop OS. Formatted copypasting, usability features, network features, etc etc... you'll have to reimplement them all, solving all the problems that systems developers solved 10 or 20 years ago. The OS will become little more th…

So we finally have a free choice of OS. It's not the full story to complain about people solving the problems that the OS side had already solved decades ago. The big new thing is that they are doing so in a platform agnostic way. That I have nine different virtual machines installed on four different operating systems and the same code base can run on all of them smoothly.

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

#154

Post by vinceguidry » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:19 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #133

silon7 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to be so snarky, he'll have all those other people out there who love XUL to help him.

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

#155

Post by toyg » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:20 PM UTC

bigquestion wrote: post #126

toyg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications.

There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely.

Face it, "web technologies" are not winning because of any massive technological advancement, just like C++ wasn't this huge advancement over C. They just managed to achieve enough critical mass to make everything else look less popular. In the '90s, OOP did that through academia and commercial push (in what was a much smaller tech sector); html/css/js did it through the accidental monopoly that is the web browser. The end result is basically the same.

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

#156

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:20 PM UTC

agentgt wrote: post #151

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…

This is not the first time (Mozilla aka Netscape) and it reminds me back when I first started my programming career and would read good ole Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Joel was right and wrong.. Firefox was a huge success (or at least in my mind it was) but some might say the Netscape company was trashed during the process (I don't know if I agree). Starting over isn't always a bad…

It was a failure as he said because the goal was to rewrite it for the company to do better. They failed at that. More work was done including by Mozilla. That worked but was too bloated and all-in-one. Eventually, someone trimmed it up to make Firefox and added the customization features. That succeeded.

So, there was a failure, years of struggling changes, several new audiences, and another big change before it made it. Not seeing it as a counterexample as much as good luck for a project that seemed doomed to failure.

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

#157

Post by apocalyptic0n3 » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

toisanji wrote: post #12

I hope that Thunderbird continues to grow. What do you guys think of the closed source product http://postbox-inc.com built on top of Thunderbird?

I've been using Postbox since 2012. It's a great client and while I've tried a ton of others (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, AirMail, Sparrow, Dropbox Mailbox, etc), I always come back to PostBox. It's stable, simple, has access to some Thunderbird extensions, and just works like I need it to.

My only gripes are that development is inconsistent at best (v4 took far too long to come out, in my opinion) and they seem to focus on features that don't add much value to the client. But overall, it's a great client that I was more than happy to pay for.

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

#158

Post by lottin » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

kriro wrote: post #92

What are viable alternatives (FLOSS+Mail+Calender+GUI)? I've used Evolution before and it was pretty good, I guess I'm switching back to that (more importantly I will have to switch my parents' computers as well, they have happily migrated to Linux). Claws also seems good at first glance. Have heard KMail and Trojita mentioned before but I'm not sure how much overhead having Qt for them would be (so basically ceteris…

Why do you have switch? If it works for you, you can continue to use Thunderbird.

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

#159

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:23 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #154

smacktoward wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then the person who forked it gets to maintain it! Lucky them.

No need to be so snarky, he'll have all those other people out there who love XUL to help him.

He's right. Mozilla, a $200-300 million a year outfit, currently maintains their software including Firefox. It's a huge C++ application. People who code XUL in their spare time, even a bunch of them, aren't likely to make a dent in keeping parity between a Firefox fork and the main release. They'd likely have trouble even porting it.

So, a fork is a rough solution and will have maintenance issues for an app this size.

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

#160

Post by stonemetal » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:23 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #113

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 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…

>I'm not sure what you're actually comparing this workflow to.

He is comparing it to what they have now, XUL + CSS + JavaScript. Replacing it with html isn't as big a change as it sounds, their UI is already written in XML and rendered by Gecko, all they are doing is moving from a custom XML like XAML(MS) or FXML(Java) to standard HTML rendered by Gecko.