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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

#211

Post by ZenoArrow »

izacus wrote: post #166
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…

Not to mention death of accessibility features - those HTML apps are effectively unusable for disabled users because they don't implement accessibilty features available in native UIs.

It's possible to build websites with accessibility features, is it not?

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

#212

Post by digi_owl »

ultramancool wrote: post #193
espadrine wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being nonstandard is completely irrelevant here It was meant as a pro. Since it was their own language, they could do anything with it. They could make a better HTML. But HTML caught up. Currently, I believe HTML is better than XUL, and making XUL great again is both a silly reuse of a political slogan and a waste of effort. I for one would rather see efforts made to allow CSS styling of all input elements in HTML.

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 don't think that has anything to do with XUL directly, you can still find its original look by furing up Seamonkey, but that Firefox developers opted to rework the UI subsystem so that it translated XUL elements into native elements as much as possible. Iirc, this was done in part to speed up the Firefox UI compared to Seamonkey.

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

#213

Post by creshal »

Kunix wrote: post #140
creshal wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Components/ES6/CSS3 features. - You can rely on native Node.js modules when needed. So, developer convenience trumps user experience? Who cares about your battery run time, how hot your PC runs, the bandwidth overhead, the massive attack surface from all the useless components shipped, how badly the webapp integrates into your OS,…

As a user, my experience with HTML/CSS/JS apps is great. Look at the excellent feedback the Atom Editor is getting. As a developer, I feel that it's easier for me to create good user experience (nice UI, easy non-blocking I/Os by default, etc). I don't say it's flawless, I say it's now becoming a very good alternative.

Oh, I'm writing web apps myself, but Gods, am I hating myself for it. OS integration is somewhere between a nightmare and impossible – and yes, it is desirable, unless you're on like Gnome 3 –, the resource requirements are abysmal (400 MB for an app that consists of a single input form, a table, and a search field, really Chrome?), performance is actually pretty lacklustre (non-blocking is one thing, actual multithreading another!), the UI isn't actually all that nice if you want to use it, not just look at it (say goodbye to accessibility; hell, even just proper keyboard navigation is black magic for most frameworks); and if you ship the engine yourself, you're now responsible for orchestrating and shipping bi-weekly browser updates to your customers to make sure your browser engine stays patched.

Is all that bullshit really worth… whatever we're saving? (Our company is mainly saving in developer salaries, because we can force kids fresh out of school to work for minimum wage, instead of hiring experienced developers… we'll see how long this keeps working.)

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

#214

Post by oneJob »

Certhas wrote: post #196
oneJob wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aspect…

Do you realize that this discussion is going on right now, in the open, on the appropriate mailing list? https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAy... Take Andrew Sutherlands email for example, that directly, out in the open, discusses the very points you raise: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc... "The problem with Thunderbird is not that it is a mail user agent or that u…

I agree a discussion of a kind is occurring. My reply was specific to the comment it addressed, in that, the comment did not fully engage with my initial comment and instead cherry picked one part of it. A more fully formed response, much like yours, wouldn't have elicited my above response. Context.

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

#215

Post by debacle »

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?'

Showing me sponsored ads on the new tab page is not building a better web for users.

Switching search engines from Google to Yahoo instead of giving users a choice at install is not building a better web for users.

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

#218

Post by gherkin0 »

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…

> 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!

> As much as people complain about XUL not looking native, wait for HTML Firefox, it will take them forever to get where XUL was years ago.

And isn't Mozilla/Netscape literally the poster child for how to destroy your product with a rewrite? They only regained their market share because Microsoft let IE stagnate to a ridiculous degree.

> But now they know that only 10 million or even 1 million people use that feature, and they're only interested in 100 million user features! If Google Chrome doesn't have it, it must not be important!

I've pretty much only stuck with Firefox because of its extensions and the quirky little features it has. The more they focus on aping Chrome, the more they decrease the friction for switching away to it.

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

#219

Post by shmerl »

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…

KMail is rather good, though I find settings UI to be non intuitive and poorly organized. Hopefully KF5 based version will address some of that.

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

#220

Post by ZenoArrow »

toyg wrote: post #155
bigquestion wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 els…

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

Nothing with the reach of web technologies. The closest I can think of is Qt, but there are issues with deploying Qt apps on some platforms.

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