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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

#201

Post by ionised »

feld wrote: post #164
tormeh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you so daft to think that the rust compiler is written in something other than C/C++?

I don't know much about Rust but the Wikipedia page says the original Rust compiler was written in OCaml, and that the new compiler is self-hosted and written in the Rust language itself.

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

#202

Post by Certhas »

aikah wrote: post #170
Certhas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So we finally have a free choice of OS Not really, you still a browser that implement all this stuff. The only difference is Open tech vs proprietary. Open technologies are obviously a good thing. Writing a software as complex as Photoshop for instance with the exact same features with HTML/CSS and JavaScript isn't going to fly and be usable for someone who has to work 10 hours a day on it. The performance issues w…

My point wasn't that they are a silver bullet. My point was simply to say that while something is obviously lost (performance, native integration, etc...), something else is gained. And that is massive portability.

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

#203

Post by adrianN »

danellis wrote: post #115
icebraining wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All languages can be compiled to native code, it's just harder for some. For example, here's an AOT compiler for JS: https://github.com/tmikov/jscomp

It's still a scripting language, and you still can't write an OS in it. There's no low-level access to the hardware. You could of course write all the low level parts in C, but then you haven't written an OS in JavaScript.

C also doesn't have low level access to the hardware. The interesting bits of the OS are written in assembly.

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

#204

Post by rndmind »

ultramancool wrote: post #195

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 h…

I second that. It's hard to find a functional and usable mail client. I may switch to claws for personal use, but I am still using thunderbird for work.

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

#205

Post by Certhas »

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…

Actually Thunderbird developers are planning to go full on html+js as well:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2015-Septembe...

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

#206

Post by bshimmin »

ath0 wrote: post #85
bshimmin wrote: post #16

The announcement from Mitchell Baker really is corporate drivel at its worst: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc... This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of signing and encrypting emails.

I feel the complete opposite about this -- it's a really good example of management not just making a conceptual decision but diving into the details and making a call, but with respect for all involved. Note that: * The chairperson joins in and speaks with authority. This isn't a VP of eng making a call about two repos. * It's not a binary decision - "cancel development, fire the people affected, leave the product t…

I think I probably would have preferred something brief and written in plain English. Its author was previously a lawyer, and it shows. I'm sure it's very measured and careful and so forth - but really everyone here can read between the lines that Mozilla want rid of Thunderbird because it's tying up their development resources and it's not their core focus.

I'm sure everything is complicated at Mozilla because there's a Foundation and a Corporation and they work on open-source projects and do "research" stuff (like Servo) and no doubt the lines between all of these things are confusingly blurred (at least to an outsider like me, but maybe internally too), and perhaps that necessitates a hundred line missive from a lawyer about laser focus... but really, does any of it need to be that complicated?

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

#207

Post by unethical_ban »

toyg wrote: post #22
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 happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. 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…

Atom and VSCode both perfom poorly, and look like garbage on Linux.

Whoa! They have syntax highlighting! And intellisense! And a package manager!

Kind of like Notepad++ or half a dozen other editors?

I'm not saying "we should NEVER use HTML for native dev", but it's not there yet, and I don't understand the hype around these two tools.

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

#209

Post by bzbarsky »

jklinger410 wrote: post #81
bshimmin wrote: post #16

The announcement from Mitchell Baker really is corporate drivel at its worst: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc... This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of signing and encrypting emails.

It also doesn't seem to make any sense to me.... >Firefox and Thunderbird have lived with competing demands for some time now But we mashed Pocket into Firefox because we think some weird non-bookmarking bookmarking (non)solution is more important for browsing the internet than viewing emails. >At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird. Not many people use T…

> I could keep paraphrasing but it's basically just "gmail rawks" over and over and over again in different words.

Given that the author of the mail uses Thunderbird as her mail client, it's fairly unlikely that "gmail rawks" is what she's actually thinking here.

But of course it's easier to snark about "built on identical platforms" without worrying about technical realities like "security and the need to do multiprocess require some fundamental changes to the way networking works in Gecko and changing the IMAP implementation in Thunderbird accordingly is... let's say rather involved".

Note that we (Gecko developers) have in fact taken great pains to not break Thunderbird so far, and are carrying some significant technical debt as a result. The big question is whether we should keep doing that or whether we should invest more heavily in Thunderbird to rewrite large pieces to allow Gecko to stop carrying that technical debt, or to decouple Thunderbird and Firefox in some way so that we can make the changes Firefox needs without breaking thunderbird, or something else. This mail is part of the discussion about that; mostly about figuring out which of those options we should really pursue.

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