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

blog.mozilla.org

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

#31

Post by smolsky »

ronnier wrote: post #12

This is good news to hear. I use Thunderbird daily and it's not a pleasant experience.

I've been using Thunderbird for the last 11 years daily at home and at work. Generally, it has been a remarkably stable and pleasant ride.

I remember a few bumps around 08..2010 where I ran beta builds because of some bugs. Also, I used to have extensions that colorized patches and highlighted quotes/threads... but those eventually broke and disappeared.

So, right now I am running a stock Thunderbird with a few profile customizations that tweak fonts (colors and sizes). Hitting GMail (work) and Fastmail (home) servers every minute or so.

Go Thunderbird!

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

#32

Post by jordigh »

martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

Is it a charity? It's the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation. Despite some explanations I've received, I've never quite understood how the money flows there. I suppose I could look up their financial statements, but my understanding is that if you donate money to Mozilla, it won't be directly used for developing software.

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

#33

Post by macns »

martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

> one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al.

Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.

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

#34

Post by martinald »

macns wrote: post #33
martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

> one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.

IIRC they got at $300m/year for having Google as the search provider in the top right box.

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

#35

Post by kylehotchkiss »

carussell wrote: post #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.

Sweeeeeeet. Maybe they'll be competitive with Mail.app. if they could match the speed and design of new Firefox, and support loading a bigger set of past emails than Mail.app can without performance issues, i'd love to use Thunderbird.

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

#36

Post by bhauer »

martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help resuscitate and modernize email.

Email, for all its faults, is among the most successful distributed protocols. And as a champion of protocols over centralized services, Mozilla should be emphatically in support of keeping email relevant, modern, and productive. Not only is Thunderbird part of that, but I'd like to see Mozilla expand their email vision to include tackling client-side encryption (ala GPG, but made user friendly).

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

#38

Post by joncrane »

brokensegue wrote: post #28
martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

richest charities? not even close? look at ikea.

How is Ikea a charity?

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

#39

Post by cookiecaper »

I fully believe that people should be wary of "just rewrite it mentality". However, in this case, when we've had a mostly-dormant Thunderbird for a long time, based on what is now an outmoded development toolkit (the outmoding of which supposedly had a non-trivial amount to do with security) backed by a very complex and large upstream codebase, which is itself in the process of being abandoned for next-gen solutions, is it really wiser to resurrect the old code?

I've used Thunderbird off and on since it was announced and I know that it has many advanced features. It's no slouch and I deeply respect that there's still a local mail and news client that somewhat works and sometimes gets a little bit of TLC. But the ecosystem is in shambles, and this is only going to get worse as Firefox diverges.

It would obviously take time for a serious revamp to reach parity, but Thunderbird needs a total skeletal reconstruction to pull it off life support and get people excited again. This is just upping the cholesterol meds.

All the other "client-side email software" applications in recent memory have been Electron apps. Surely Mozilla can do us one better, and build a revitalized Thunderbird with staying power on an appropriate modern stack? This seems like a great pilot project for a serious Rust-based desktop toolkit.

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

#40

Post by abrowne »

joncrane wrote: post #38
brokensegue wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

richest charities? not even close? look at ikea.

How is Ikea a charity?

IIRC the brand is owned and licensed by a Dutch organization – legally a charity – created by the founder for tax avoidance purposes.
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