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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

#261

Post by vocatus_gate »

gist wrote: post #152
jacquesm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is my opinion - which is not shared by many, I'm aware of that - that the web is moving too fast . This is why we're dealing with massive data leaks and unreliable services on a daily basis. If the quality of desk top software in the 80's and the 90's had been as bad as the quality of your average consumer website (my bank for instance) then the PC revolution would have never happened. I'm all for a slower pace wi…

"which is not shared by many" I agree with your opinion and am one of those that shares that thought as well. "If the quality of desk top software in the 80's and the 90's" Exactly. And it couldn't be as bad back in the day when things had to be good simply because you didn't want to have to update by floppy (or even CD) a bunch of software with issues. The focus on quality isn't there. It isn't there because of the…

A large part of the instability and security problems are also because software is so, so SO much more complex these days. There is just a lot more to consider when writing code than there used to be. So it's not necessarily that it's moving too fast, it could also just be from increased complexity.

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

#262

Post by ultramancool »

jccc wrote: post #236
islandtech wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Webmail or IMAP mail, look no further than Fastmail. These guys know exactly what they are doing with IMAP and they can easily accomodate your multiple accounts. I've been a Fastmail user for almost a decade. I've never been happier with any email provider (or any provider, to be honest). You pay for the service, but it's worth the money and more. You are treated like a valued customer and the support, if needed,…

ultramancool wants a desktop email client. Many people strongly prefer to do email on the desktop outside of a Web browser. (Fellow FastMail user here. They're really great.) EDIT: Well, I see her/his comment about Webmail albeit as a second choice. It seems the preference is for a desktop client, but I shouldn't assume.

I'm basically okay with Webmail if it's self hosted and supports notifications on many accounts.

If I recall correctly, fastmail cannot be self hosted and I really don't feel like trusting some random service with my personal and business email. Or paying them money for something I currently get for free for that matter.

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

#263

Post by edwintorok »

joonoro wrote: post #27

Funny I should see this today, I spent yesterday afternoon reading articles about Thunderbird and other mail clients and ended up migrating from Thunderbird to mu4e [0] (purely for reasons of usability). If this is true (and there is some reason to doubt it, as this isn't the first time Thunderbird has been declared "dead"), and considering that Geary is no longer in active development either (maybe the Elementary OS…

I've also seen 'notmuch' recommended as email interface for emacs. Did you try it and could you compare it to mu4e?

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

#264

Post by bad_user »

oneJob wrote: post #198
Certhas wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

When Facebook forces a user to opt-out it's acceptable to denounce their actions. How is the Pocket example different? One of my biggest, if not my biggest, complaint about the OSS community it the lack of sympathy toward non technical users. If I was a point-and-click, non-technical user do you think I'd have any clue what you meant by 'mailing list'? Not likely. And if I was that user what are the chances that I un…

I haven't seen any denouncing of Facebook in a long time, even though they keep getting worse every month. I assume it is because people accepted they are assholes, they won, they can't be replaced and that's that.

And personally I consider the backlash against Pocket to be either undeserved kneejerk reactions, or a discreditation strategy sponsored by Mozilla's competition. Because seriously, why aren't we seeing the same backlash against Chrome, which includes proprietary bits not present in Chromium (like the PDF viewer) and that explicitly does not support extensions on Android because of Google's fear of losing ad revenue? Or maybe we should talk about how Chrome does not encrypt data by default, most users giving access to Google for their whole browsing history. We could talk about IExplorer^WEdge or Safari and how Apple and Microsoft are blocking alternative browser engines on their mobiles, but that's not as fun as bashing the only open browser that's backed by a non-profit without ulterior motives.

But then lives without our double standards would be boring.

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

#265

Post by grinich »

vdaniuk wrote: post #76

I've never been completely satisfied with Thunderbird and have tried to switch multiple times, reverting to web clients every time. Now I am using Nylas N1 built on electron(imagine that!) and it looks very promising. Also, arrogance of tech conservatives in every Mozilla or web tech thread on HN is becoming unbearable.

Thanks for the kind works about N1! (I work at Nylas.) Feel free to send us any feedback if you have ideas for how to improve the app. :)

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

#266

Post by ultramancool »

Karunamon wrote: post #244
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've moved to Mutt/OfflineIMAP on most every machine I own, and it's worked remarkably well. It's a CLI app, yes, but it outshines Thunderbird (and most other GUI clients, for that matter) in a number of ways: - FAST. Mutt lets you process thousands of messages in short order. Mutt is directly responsible for helping me dig out of a 50k deep email hole brought on by years of GMail's approach (archive, never delete) i…

How well does mutt work with multiple accounts though? Last I saw it seemed more cumbersome than Alpine for that.

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

#267

Post by kuschku »

cwyers wrote: post #175
simpleigh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But, sadly, they aren’t replacing XUL with HTML.

Instead, they plan to render the UI natively, with only "some" parts in HTML.

So, instead of XUL + HTML, we’re going to get GTK + WinForms + Cocoa + HTML. Great, eh?

And we lose the ability to style it with addons – your themes can only change the background image of the header bar, that’s it.

And the remaining addons can’t modify the UI (tree style tabs, bottom tabs, etc) anymore either, instead you can only modify page content.

I’m seriously pissed off now, because Firefox was the last browser where I could actually customize it how I liked it.

I hope the person who made this decision is going to have to use software without any config options and with horrible defaults, like GNOME. For the rest of their life. May their car always have have either 60°C+ heat, or -20°C AC, may their screen of their phone always either be too dark, or too bright.

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

#268

Post by fl0wenol »

vdaniuk wrote: post #76

I've never been completely satisfied with Thunderbird and have tried to switch multiple times, reverting to web clients every time. Now I am using Nylas N1 built on electron(imagine that!) and it looks very promising. Also, arrogance of tech conservatives in every Mozilla or web tech thread on HN is becoming unbearable.

Do the web clients you've tried or N1 speak LDAP and support S/MIME with a local smart card reader?

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

#269

Post by pcwalton »

emidln wrote: post #190
janvidar wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, tons of nonstandard SpiderMonkey features have been removed. Sharp literals were axed, E4X was removed, "let" is being changed to the ES6 behavior, and so on.

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

#270

Post by ZenoArrow »

scrollaway wrote: post #235
ZenoArrow wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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)" So web apps can't have reusable components now? > "And having access to all the latest JS additions! ... that were copied from other languages you could develop desktop apps in, because JS is a terrible hack." WebA…

> So web apps can't have reusable components now? I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying they don't. You go ahead and try to fix that, create widget#772981 that still won't support typed-selection, or will break with large text or what not... I've seen too many of those, most of them bad, and none of them standard. So far, React is the only thing that even comes close to a sane model for a contender to UI development…

> "I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying they don't."

They already do. Electron, Web Components, etc...

> "Do you even have evidence that it'll be better than what we have now in other languages if it does take over?"

Compare the performance of vanilla JS vs. asm.js. It is clear from what developers have stated that WebAssembly performance will exceed the performance of asm.js, the threading improvements alone should offer noticeable benefits.

> "Years of experience making them more accessible, more usable, more consistent with the platform they're running on, etc."

So what are we looking at to replicate that? A theme per platform? Some accessibility work? What else?

It should be noted that the web isn't starting from zero with UX either, we've already had 20+ years of refinements to the web user experience.

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