Bad news if true. Why would a not-for-profit foundation not support core productivity software used by 10M+ people?
Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
331–340 of 443 posts
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#332I 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…
"didn't DPI scale properly", "strange behavior with my IMAP server", "consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system", "handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages".
If you have enough rigid requirements nothing will ever be a good fit.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#333They 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…
Don't forget servo. Even if it's not official yet, Servo is the way to go for Firefox. Implementing XUL in servo would be a huge mistake.
Project Oxidation is what you're looking for.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#334Earlier 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,…
How does it compare to, say, Gmail enterprise? Well, apart from the whole Google Apps. I'm curious because we'll have to migrate to a better email provider in a month or two, and Gmail enterprise seemed to be the best fit for us (price, storage, good iOS app to leverage push notifications, etc).
Google's rendition of IMAP isn't following any standard but their own. Fastmail uses Cyrus IMAP server, which most certainly follows standards.
I've been a Fastmail user for almost 10 years. Never an issue that was not solved in very short order and most professionally. Fastmail offer a modern product with old world service and charm. A win-win.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#335If 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…
I think this is just a reaction to Firefox's rapidly declining market share. We've been through this cycle before, when MSIE and Windows were the dominant browser platform and Netscape Communicator hit a local maxima. It took a few years, but they came back, with Firefox. Before we did a big transition from Desktop to Web; now a lot of people are shifting their focus from Web to Mobile. The Desktop never went away, a…
For me though, Firefox is already the best browser on mobile though.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#336I 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/
"4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)" Wow why does it need so much RAM.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a lot of people are forgetting that there is still a community developing it since Mozilla stopped "updating" it, beyond maintenance, in 2012. The product isn't dying, just will no longer be Mozilla backed. I assume that maintenance, like ongoing updates, will be passed to the community and hopefully another company steps up to back the project. Repo for Thunderbird: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central
Thanks for highlighting the repo! I too had heard development had stopped and misconstrued that to mean all development. Now I'm wondering if there are any issues I might be able to help fix. I still use Thunderbird so if I can help keep it alive, I'd like to. As parent pointed out, most of the alternatives are worse.
No problem. I think everyone got out their pitchforks without reading Mozilla's announcement and looking at the repo.
There are always issues to help out on. Here's a bit more info on contributing [0]. I imagine it won't change much as the project is officially handed off to the community. It's largely led by the community anyways at this point.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the new stuff, especially Firefox, is coming full circle in how friggin' slow they run to serve the lowest common denominator of web pages. It should be easy to find performance numbers showing how Firefox 42 renders old, pre-CSS pages slower than, say, Netscape 4, then. Netscape 4 didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for…
Notice my references to Web 1.0, 2.0, etc? That means my comment was talking about not just the browsers but the sites designed for them. The combination of the two have made web sites really slow that could be designed to load up instantly. Instead, they load up as slowly as some sites did on my old Pentium 2 running Opera, etc. You'd think they'd be significantly faster with all the Moore's law iterations and brows…
Opera and IE were no different in architecture.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#339I 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 run Zimbra, and their webmail UI is the best I've seen - much more functional than GMail.
Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
#340[...] Thunderbird, the free email, chat and news client it first developed in 2004 [...] In 2004 Thunderbird spun off the Mozilla Suite (Browser, Mail, WYSIWYG HTML editor, IRC-chat client), like Firefox. And Mozilla Suite is based itself on Netscape Suite, that AOL donated as open source code and formed the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla was the internal codename of Netscape). The Netscape Suite was a complete rewrite…
Anyone got the source to Navigator 4 still? I'd rather use that.