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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

#181

Post by oneJob »

mhurron wrote: post #172
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?'

It might be. But what about the discussion? Is focusing on a native mail application not inline with their mission statement, given all the privacy issues of late? And your point doesn't address the issue of implementation. Firefox is one initiative out of many initiatives in Mozilla's portfolio. And the web is not the browser. So I, personally, would say no, focusing on a browser to the exclusion of all other aspects of the Internet is not inline with that mission. But, I'm one of many users, and without open dialogue, it's impossible to say whether other Mozilla users agree with me.

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

#182

Post by nickpsecurity »

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.

LISP, a semi-functional language, was originally invented to solve the biggest, hardest problems. Scheme, Common LISP, Ocaml/ML, and Haskell have all been used in large systems with good performance. Entire OS's were written in LISP's with some benefits that modern machines still don't have:

http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm

Note: And some that are laughably obvious and available today lol.

So, yes, what people use today is an accident of history. That includes COBOL, C, C++, OOP languages, HTML/CSS/JS, HTTP-centric everything, and especially whatever crap is being built on them next.

If you're curious, here's the history I put together on C language and UNIX in numbered list form. You'll see how IT evolution often works in practice to give us lowest common denominator. And afterwards people swear it was product of good design and great achievement. (rolls eyes)

http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG

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

#183

Post by geff82 »

So a foundation with a 300 million Dollar budget can't support the most widespread free mailing software out there? A software that shares many parts with the Firefox browser? This makes no sense to me. It's ridiculous that they stop this project instead of going full stem forward to make it finally great. They are not that far away to malomg it a viable free alternative to Outlook (and they'd have happy followers)

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

#184

Post by Piskvorrr »

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.

s/smoothly/in the same crappy but standardized way/

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

#185

Post by walterbell »

stonemetal wrote: post #160
scrollaway wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In that case, could the XUL dependency be removed from Thunderbird?

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

#186

Post by vocatus_gate »

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,…

Question coming from a long-time sysad whose experience is almost entirely batch and PowerShell, what does it mean to write "testable" code?

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

#187

Post by selimthegrim »

hmokay wrote: post #136
peferron wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What, they don't watch enough DS9 for your tastes?

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

#189

Post by toyg »

stonemetal wrote: post #160
scrollaway wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unlike you know something I don't about Kunix specifically, I don't think he's talking about Mozilla development in particular, but rather development in general.

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

#190

Post by emidln »

janvidar wrote: post #179
emidln wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was poking at the non-standard portion. Lowering barrier to development of plugins, patches, etc is fine, but being standard doesn't help or hinder that. Popularity and ease of introduction help that. Javascript (that is, the dialect of ECMAScript that is implemented by Firefox) itself is non-standard and Mozilla isn't throwing that one out for exclusively ES2015.
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