Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 443 posts

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

#391

Post by iSnow »

georgerobinson wrote: post #365
betteringred wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for writing new apps in HTML, I think Atom and VSCode are awesome, but I'm not for rewriting huge legacy apps to be HTML apps for no good reason. 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. No one has listed the ten awesome features that we'…

I really want to agree with you that Atom is awesome, and it is, in principle, but in reality a text editor should not be using 300MB of RAM. Sublime Text, which I consider to be a direct competitor, barely uses 20MB of memory on my machine even after hours of use. Heck, does Intellij even use that much memory? I'm just really discouraged with how more and more desktop apps are being written in HTML, CSS and Javascri…

Considering my first 16 Bit computer had 3MB RAM and ran MS Word alongside a GUI, I am wary to say "Amount X of RAM is preposterous for a given task".

As long as Moore's law provides enough lift under our wings, RAM usage is one of the less important aspects of an application. However, I fear the trend of building application UI's in HTML/CSS because invariably it will lead to wildly inconsistent look, feel and behavior.

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

#392

Post by mc808 »

mmahemoff wrote: post #122
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, anything helps. They're starving over at Mozilla. They took in a mere $323 million in 2014. How can you expect them to properly fund multiple projects on such a pittance? /sarcasm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650325

Which would be a ton of cash for most applications, but this is a web browser and they are in direct competition with not just one, but several, of the biggest companies in the world. Here are their 2014 revenues: $86 billion (MS), $182 billion, $66 billion. Budgets for the other browsers aren't clearly defined, but we do know it's a big focus for all the manufacturers and they each have major incentives to keep user…

I'm fairly sure the revenue attributable to Firefox dwarfs what any of the bigger competitors are spending on their browsers, so it's not really for lack of resources if Firefox falls behind. But it's the cash cow that subsidizes pretty much everything Mozilla does, some of which is great and some dubious. Everyone can make their own case for which projects are great and which are iffy.

Personally, I would think an e-mail client is the perfect complement to browser development, and something that could/should be another significant source of revenue instead of a burden.

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

#393

Post by vdaniuk »

cognivore wrote: post #361
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.

>> tech conservative What the heck is that?

Well, in this context those who are angry and are actively opposing proliferation of new web tech. Web tech may include new front-end JS frameworks, electron apps built with HTML/CSS for desktop, node itself, es2015 features.

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

#394

Post by CaptSpify »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #162
creshal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 are doing I'm 25 and I feel to old for this industry already.

What bothers me about being older is my first browser was Internet Explorer, then I got to play with MOSAIC's slow arse in school, then used Opera/Mozilla, and so on. Got to see where it came from. 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's annoying. I miss Web 1.0. Add just a bit of dynamic functionality plus br…

Disable javascript. Seriously.

Disabling js has given me the fastest turn-round on page-load times. It's usually not the browser, but loading 15 different un-optimized JS engines that causes the problem.

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

#395

Post by shmerl »

zanny wrote: post #253
shmerl wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They already released 5.0, and didn't change anything. What is more likely to happen is the development of a Plasma Mobile QML UI built on top of Kontact and the new Akonadi that you can switch between, and that the desktop version might just use a reactive designed mobile UI as default with the current UI being available as a toggle option.

That's a pity. I didn't get KF5 one yet since it's still in experimental in Debian[1] and I assumed it's not usable enough. Settings UI in KMail really needs some serious streamlining.

[1]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kdepim

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

#396

Post by JupiterMoon »

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…

> probably Alpine, a CLI based client

I think that Mutt might be a better option in that I think it is still maintained.

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

#397

Post by ultramancool »

smt88 wrote: post #371
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.

Have you looked at Mailpile[1]? I haven't used it, but their idea was basically "self-hosted Gmail". https://www.mailpile.is

Yeah, definitely looks interesting, but the issue I have is again the multi-account issue. Thunderbird has very nice handling of many different email accounts.

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

#398

Post by dcposch »

johnsonjo wrote: post #345
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 saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1

Nylas is a beautiful app and, by design, easily extensible. As a result, I think that it has a better chance than other open source mail clients of providing an experience that's as polished and complete as Gmail. Doing that requires a bunch of affordances like calendar integration, Youtube previews, warning if you forgot to add an attachment, 10-second "undo send", and so on. Letting the community write those as add-ons seems smart.

To really make Nylas compelling over Gmail, and also to replace Thunderbird, here's what I think needs to happen:

1. Bundle Sync Engine and N1 into a single program.

2. Implement local search. Faster than IMAP search and doesn't rely on a network connection.

(As it stands, Nylas requires an internet connection to work. As long as that's the case it's no Thunderbird replacement at all, and will have a v hard time winning over Gmail users.)

The good news is that both Sync Engine and N1 are GPLv3, so it's totally possible. The bad news is complexity:

* Sync Engine is written in Python and uses MySQL for persistence

* N1 is built with Coffeescript + React + Electron, and uses SQLite for persistence

So we need to simplify. We can't just bundle all that into an app, it would be a monstrosity. Here's how I think we could do it instead:

* Use Sync Engine as the basis for a Node library for IMAP sync

* Use the SQLite full-text feature (fts4) for search

That way you'd have a single Electron app with all persistence in SQLite.

I'm prototyping this now. Thoughts? Let me know if you have ideas or want to help!

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

#399

Post by e12e »

creshal wrote: post #243
hga wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial software based Multics had 64 rings, and as I recall only 8 in the hardware versions. No more than 4 were needed in practice: 0 for root, 1 for mail (e.g. you could delete mail you'd sent to other people from their mailboxes if they'd not read it yet), 4 for normal users, and 5 for some stuff that e.g. allowed anyone to use, but was restricted at touching anything deeper in the system. AMD dropped rings in th…

> AMD dropped rings in their 64 bit architecture which Intel was forced to adopt, so they're becoming a historical curiosity. Not quite. Hypervisors are operating in Ring -1, SMM is equivalent to another ring above that, and I can't find anything about AMD64 dropping Ring 1/2? Ring 0/3 at least are still in use.

AFAIK 64-bit linux has kernel in 0 and userspace in 3?

http://wiki.osdev.org/SYSENTER

http://www.x86-64.org/pipermail/discuss/2000-October/001068....

I tried looking at the latest 4.2 kernel tree - but the assembler/c-code that sets up and deals with sys-calls has been rather re-factored, so I'm not entirely adamant it's ring 0 and ring 3 for both 32bit and 64bit - but I think so? (From a quick glance, no sections stand out as calling out ring 3 explicitly when talking about returning to user-land -- granted I didn't do any searching over the code).

Post reply on HN