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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

#291

Post by zobzu »

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…

Mozilla is pretty much a regular for profit as this point, it just doesnt have share holders. Still is for profit. Mainly benefits the people at the helm instead.

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

#292

Post by zobzu »

debacle wrote: post #215
mhurron wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both make money. Yahoo pays more than google.

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

#293

Post by ultramancool »

islandtech wrote: post #274
ultramancool wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand, but send these guys an email. One of the founders will likely respond to you. I used to run all my own stuff, but when my children came along, I didn't want to spend all my time chasing issues with servers. Look the Fastmail guys up. If anyone is doing email correctly, it's Rob, Bron, and the guys at Fastmail. They actually write some of the code for the Cyrus IMAP server, so if you were in doubt as to…

> They are based in Melbourne, Australia, but use NYI here in the US.

Mhm, 2 of the "Five Eyes" countries. Yeah, you're really selling me on this one.

I'll admit I'm being a bit ridiculously paranoid, but it's cheap paranoia for me, Thunderbird works well as a client and I spend maybe 5 minutes per month doing mail server admin stuff. I'm really not willing to switch to any hosted solution for this.

Just looking for another mail client option if/when Thunderbird goes down hill, not a mail server.

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

#294

Post by INTPenis »

I'm saddened because the only thing holding me back from using Linux full time at work is the lack of a good calendar and e-mail application.

Of course thunderbird is insufficient for me who rely on Microsoft Exchange at work but it could still be a contender to Evolution given the right development focus.

Evolution, the number one alternative I know of today, has had shaky EWS support from day one and in Fedora 23 on my personal laptop it's still not fully resolved. Also I find its calendar option quite hideous actually, it tries to mimic Outlook but that's not a good thing imho. The best calendar I've used is Calendar.app on Mac OS.

Of course you can't blame anyone but us, the community. The one EWS plugin for Thunderbird is pay-2-play and the one for Evolution is the one having all the issues. So either Microsoft is hard to develop for or demand isn't high enough.

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

#295

Post by angry-hacker »

cm3 wrote: post #176
Natanael_L wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivaldi seems neat, which is essentially Chromium with a HTML5 GUI built by the old Opera folks intended to restore the best features of old Opera, with a heavy focus on customization. My hope is that Mozilla will take the direction of using Servo to build something Vivaldi-like (instead of everybody running with Webkit/Blink) and start to restore old API:s and frameworks from old XUL-Firefox that all the best old ad…

Have you tried using Vivaldi? It's awfully slow to respond to user interaction because it's all HTML. Say what you want about XUL, but for something aiming to be like HTML it never felt slow. If Vivaldi's non-existing responsiveness is what the new Firefox will be, then they should seriously consider to rewrite the whole thing like a game (in OpenGL/Vulkan) instead. Oh and XUL was optimized for memory efficiency, whi…

Vivaldi is much faster than Firefox on both Linux and Windows, where I'm using it. Of course it's still alpha software, but the UI is blazing fast compared to FF.

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

#296

Post by stonemetal »

walterbell wrote: post #185
stonemetal wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I don't see why it couldn't, they are doing it for FireFox. On the other hand Mozilla has been on the path to retire Thunderbird for some time, this is just the next step.

Mostly I think it is an effort vs reward thing. Thunderbird doesn't have the user base and doesn't have a revenue stream the way fire fox sells the search box. I wonder if anyone over there has thought about cleaning it up and selling it as a white label email client.

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

#297

Post by cpeterso »

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…

Thunderbird usage continues to grow, almost reaching 10M users:

https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...

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

#298

Post by zobzu »

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,…

Learn C, use python/go/whatever for most tasks.

C teaches you how stuff works. Its important.

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

#299

Post by ultramancool »

jcurbo wrote: post #277
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…

Thunderbird user for years here. I now use Postbox, which is (I believe) a commercial fork of Thunderbird. https://www.postbox-inc.com/

Interesting, I'll definitely take a look at this. I don't mind paying for it, but I'd be a bit iffy on going from a nice open source solution to a proprietary one.

EDIT: Nevermind, no Linux build, that's out for me unfortunately.

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

#300

Post by debacle »

zobzu wrote: post #292
debacle wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both make money. Yahoo pays more than google.

Not enough money to support Thunderbird apparently...
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