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Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

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Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#4
The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#6

The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! XUL is really cool. Still one of my favorite GUI kits. It is like electron (but actually native!) and had a good reason to be slow (spidermonkey wasn't super fast) :(

XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#7
Huh, I was going to post this story, but I thought it was not allowed because it's a job posting and I had to wait until the Who is Hiring thread.

So, if posting jobs for working on free applications is ok outside of Who Is Hiring, let me try to advertise this job for another free email client, Mailpile, which got killed when I tried to post it earlier:

https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/

I currently use Evolution for email, which is ok and I've gotten used to its limitations, but I would love a more modern client!

Edit: I guess it's not ok. I'm confused.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#8

The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.

I have fond memories of XPCOM and XUL... Back in 04 we had a desktop application mostly a collection of C++ bindings to the Firebird database and for silly reasons I started the GUI with Gtk+ but as we continued to struggle with porting to Win32 (like we sell this to people in Win32 not Linux) and I started to find a need to embed web content (cause like we should have written the whole thing as a web app - native apps are silly). I recall hacking the event loop to get Gtk+ and gecko to play nice in Win32. Anyways, XPCOM allowing me to write IDL files and expose my C++ work as JavaScript was at the time amazing and allowed me to quickly rewrite most of the UI in XUL and keep all the SQL work we'd done such that if I recall correctly we were able to port the application some 500k lines of code over to XUL. This was right before XulRunner... I still to this day feel good things about IDL/XPCOM and XUL for converting to see the light with JavaScript and HTML. XUL is just like a basically less well supported version of HTML and so is that MS markup language and event Gtk+'s Glade is just an XML editor for a UI... I beleive even OSX via xcode has an underlying XML format to describe the UI... and IMO HTML is light years ahead for UI.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#9
post #6

The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! XUL is really cool. Still one of my favorite GUI kits. It is like electron (but actually native!) and had a good reason to be slow (spidermonkey wasn't super fast) :( XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM

I miss the old easter eggs Firefox had. https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...
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