Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

Just yesterday I had commented in a donation related thread here that it would be nice to donate to Thunderbird as one of the causes that's important. [1] As a long time Thunderbird user in an Exchange/Outlook environment, I'm disappointed each time I hear news about its priority being pushed further down.

The TechCrunch article says, "Apart from the fact that Mozilla had cut off most development support in 2012, Thunderbird has become a somewhat anachronistic product." For any enterprise or business environment where email still rules, calling Thunderbird "anachronistic" sounds misinformed and insulting. Thunderbird may not have the market share of Outlook or the glamor of smartphone based mail apps, but I'm sure those who use Thunderbird are really passionate about what it provides and the extensibility that comes with it.

One of the things I don't like about the Mozilla of the past few years is the high amount of effort and time spent on Firefox OS. I don't want to put that down, but Mozilla is trying very hard with very less traction on it and still pushing onward.

Mitchell's message sounds like more planning is in the works to separate Thunderbird and probably make it stand on its own. This will take some time to plan and execute, with Thunderbird just languishing in the meantime. There could also be a complete re-write of Thunderbird, which is not really a great idea. I can see both optimistic and pessimistic views on what the future holds.

When Mozilla Messaging was announced, I had high hopes for better integration with Exchange calendaring and also improved search. All that went to nothing in 2012.

If Thunderbird ends up as a separate entity that I can donate directly to, I'll be one of the first to do so!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650432

Good luck - the main advantage of XUL IMO is that it looks and feels native to the platform. This is completely lacking in any HTML based UI I've ever seen. It's been a major advantage for FF extensions and I can't help but feel like it's a major step backwards to lose it.

I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages in each. The best alternative I've seen is probably Alpine, a CLI based client, but that was difficult to use and seemed to randomly send deleted characters from emails to clients, which was almost a major issue on one occasion.

I'm just going to keep running Thunderbird until there are gaping security holes, people say Thunderbird is bad but everything else is worse.

> 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.

And for me that would be much much lower than teaching how to keeps things simple. The whole modern web has a bad case of over engineering, everything is modules of modules of modules, with so many tools associated you get a headache trying to install a simple JavaScript library (what is wrong with a download link and I drop the lib on my page, nothing that is what).

I'm all for modern approaches but I can't help but feel many developers have lost touch with what writing clean code is, it's not making module, libraries or even tests, it's making sure what you are doing is as simple as it can be and efficient at it. Sadly most modern web stack fail at that. All hidden in mumbo jumbo of modules and dependencies no-one really needed or asked for, often created by people who never questioned the purpose of what they were doing, or if the whole internet needed it (because you are at Google and have found a neat way to deal with your huge JS stack doesn't mean the whole web needed it too, and that you needed to spent a whole lot of effort making people adopt it).

As much as you make fun of C, learning and writing C will teach you to keep you programs simple and efficient, because the language requires it. And that's coming from someone who started programming with Perl, then PHP, and only learned C later on.

Makes thing simple not simpler should be the cardinal rule of programming, not modularize and test everything, those are situational, the former applies all the time.

There's scenario 3: a news site took a mail on a project mailing list, and wrote a misleading article with a clickbaity headline. So far so common.

To their credit, they did include the full text of the mail, and it simply doesn't support the "Mozilla about to stop Thunderbird maintenance" subject this is being titled with. And the title here on HN looks nothing like the title of the actual article either (though that might have been edited later, of course).