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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

#171

Post by nickpsecurity »

pmelendez wrote: post #121
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.

>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 t…

Referring to architecture, algorithms, language features, etc obviously. They were all better on many machines from 1960's-1980's. Market kept rejecting anything that wasn't backward compatible with existing garbage and had max performance per dollar. So, dumb CPU's, COBOL, and C it is. :)

Gave examples of what features old ones had in the essay below with the first link mentioning the specific systems for further inspection:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_h...

Note: B5500, System/38, and Ten15/FLEX are all especially worth considering. Two were basically HLL machines with type-safety and interface safety enforced at hardware level. System/38 was object-based with HW- and SW-level protections plus portable microcode layer.

I'd say Channel I/O counts as one that kicks modern systems' asses. Servers have been copying it bit by bit over past ten years, maybe even exceeding it, but server OS's are inherently inferior in usage given mainframe OS's are designed for I/O offloading at core. Near interrupt-less architecture with acceleration engines makes many apps scream with performance. And would only cost $10 per CPU on desktops but would require Windows & Linux rewrites. (sighs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_channel

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

#172

Post by mhurron »

oneJob wrote: post #169

If this was an open source "project", rather than a "foundation" whose mission is to build a better web for its users, I'd say it was their call and that's the beauty of OSS. This is not that. This is another decision in a long string of decisions which are either not in their users' interest, questionable, or poorly communicated and implemented. If I were to give the benefit of the doubt here over the question of wh…

How is focusing on Firefox not inline with a mission statement of 'building a better web for it's users?'

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

#173

Post by agentgt »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #156
agentgt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mad…

I don't disagree it was a bad idea to do the rewrite but rather the company (Netscape) was on a downward spiral regardless (it didn't help but I don't think it was the sole reason).

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

#174

Post by toyg »

Certhas wrote: post #153
toyg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that's not true: Webkit, Gecko, Trident... they are all different "OSs" you're writing for, you just wave them away by shipping the OS with the application. You could do the same by shipping a virtualised image running a stripped-down Linux configured to run only one application. One of these solutions is now socially acceptable, but both manage to completely discard everything the desktop OS achieved in 30 years.

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

#175

Post by cwyers »

simpleigh wrote: post #57
betteringred wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for writing new apps in HTML, I think Atom and VSCode are awesome, but I'm not for rewriting huge legacy apps to be HTML apps for no good reason. 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. No one has listed the ten awesome features that we'…

> 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

Well, or Firefox as a web browser has to render HTML/CSS/JavaScript no matter what, and now that HTML/CSS is at feature parity or better with XUL in the space XUL is meant to occupy, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to maintain two competing technologies when one receives 95% of their internal developer attention and 99.99999999999999% of external developer attention.

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

#176

Post by cm3 »

Natanael_L wrote: post #30
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…

Vivaldi seems neat, which is essentially Chromium with a HTML5 GUI built by the old Opera folks intended to restore the best features of old Opera, with a heavy focus on customization. My hope is that Mozilla will take the direction of using Servo to build something Vivaldi-like (instead of everybody running with Webkit/Blink) and start to restore old API:s and frameworks from old XUL-Firefox that all the best old ad…

Have you tried using Vivaldi? It's awfully slow to respond to user interaction because it's all HTML. Say what you want about XUL, but for something aiming to be like HTML it never felt slow. If Vivaldi's non-existing responsiveness is what the new Firefox will be, then they should seriously consider to rewrite the whole thing like a game (in OpenGL/Vulkan) instead. Oh and XUL was optimized for memory efficiency, which will have to be reoptimized for the HTML-only interface, but that can benefit the whole web.

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

#178

Post by vinceguidry »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #159
vinceguidry wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 siz…

I was being facetious.

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

#179

Post by janvidar »

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.

It is not entirely irrelevant.

Given that there are more developers familiar with HTML development, it may lower the barrier to developing plug-ins, or providing patches.

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

#180

Post by Certhas »

oneJob wrote: post #169

If this was an open source "project", rather than a "foundation" whose mission is to build a better web for its users, I'd say it was their call and that's the beauty of OSS. This is not that. This is another decision in a long string of decisions which are either not in their users' interest, questionable, or poorly communicated and implemented. If I were to give the benefit of the doubt here over the question of wh…

Uhhh... the final point in the mailing list message is this:

---

> 12. This message is about the future and there’s a lot to work out. It’s explicitly not to announce changes in daily activities at this point. People using Thunderbird will not see any change in the product they use. We have started this conversation early because Mozilla works best when our community is engaged. This is how we gather the people who are interested, and enable those folks to engage productively

---

So this is exactly not a case of confronting people with made decisions, but discussing long term strategic considerations in the open. Bakers message is actually remarkably explicit about this, discussing various pros and cons explicitly out in the open.

---

> 10. The fact that the Foundation is facilitating these discussions does not necessarily mean that the Foundation is or is not the best legal and financial home for Thunderbird. The intent is not to make technical decisions about support of Thunderbird by Mozilla employees, or merging repositories, etc. Point 6 above is the shared organizing principle for both of us.

---

So Mozilla is actually not talking about no longer supporting Thunderbird, they are talking about decoupling the projects, possibly within Mozilla. When did it become hip to just randomly hate on Mozilla for everything? I use Firefox daily, and some random Pocket icon appeared there. I don't know what it is, it took me one right click and one left click to remove it from my toolbar, done.

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