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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

#161

Post by alexeldeib »

plushpuffin wrote: post #157
martinald wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not only that, but they added a clause to their contract with Yahoo that let them get out of it while still forcing Yahoo to pay if Yahoo was purchased by another company. When Verizon bought Yahoo, Mozilla switched their default search engine back to Google. I believe they're receiving double pay from both search companies for the next year or two.

I remember when the Vz-Yahoo deal was going down, and realizing how all this would play out. That they got that deal, and now are reaping double pay like that...incredible.

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

#162

Post by DonHopkins »

wrinkl3 wrote: post #154
DonHopkins wrote: post #143

The most practical, logical, obvious move would to be to reimplement Thunderbird as an Electron app. But of course that would be untenable for Mozilla because it would be admitting defeat to Chrome. The problem is that Mozilla has no alternative to Electron. There are a number of false starts and head fakes, but none of them have any buy in or support or future.

What would it take for Mozilla to build an Electron-like runtime with Firefox?

Will, commitment, follow through, etc.

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

#163

Post by aidenn0 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #139
aidenn0 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO claws-mail is better than thunderbird for e-mail.

Any specific features you believe makes it better than TB? First impressions aren't great -- is Claws an "email should be text only" advocate? -- brief look and the default mail format being non-standard; and all the screenshots on the website showing text only emails; tools including a special script to order threads by date (how else would you order them?); and the latest amendments to those scripts being over a ye…

You need to enable a plugin for html mail, but the plugin ships with claws. Up until 2013 the best option was a janky GtkHtml based plugin (about as good as average html e-mail renderings from early 00s, so not good), the current one is webkit based and works great[1]

What do you mean by "default mail https://www.colino.net/wordpress/archives/2013/03/14/claws-m... being non-standard"?

you don't need a script to order threads by date, it's an option in the main menu.

It doesn't offer downloading over HTTPS, but a GPG signature is provided. Old-school, but not at all insecure.

Things it does better than TB:

TB has corrupted it's mail store on 3 separate occasions, in 3 different releases spread out over a decade. Claws has never done that. That's the reason I switched.

It's builtin filtering, sorting, &c. tools are really great. Full-text search is slower than I'd like, but header based searching is plenty fast (the mode I use most searches all of from/to/subject, which is mostly what I want to do). When I need to do full-text searching I fall back on notmuch.

My requirements for an e-mail client are fairly simple (in order of importance):

1) Let me read my mail

2) Don't lose my mail

3) Give me some reasonable way to automate the parts of my workflow that it makes sense to.

TB has failed so bad at #2, that I've not spent the time to explore how it is at #3. It's about equal at #1.

1: https://www.colino.net/wordpress/archives/2013/03/14/claws-m...

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

#164

Post by pfranz »

sangnoir wrote: post #128
jermaustin1 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was soo ready to agree with GP, in fact I upvoted them, because the rebuttal stands in my opinion (they aren't the richest in the world and they don't make 9 figures), but you are also so very right... Why the eff haven't they hired a $120k/yr rounding error to work on the application? Maybe they have tried, but no one wanted the job (especially to do solo). There could be plenty of answers to this, but I wish they…

My best guess is that Thunderbird has no internal sponsor: email is not sexy tech - Mozilla is made up of people, and people would rather work on cutting-edge compiler research, "IoT" or the money-maker (Fx).

You're probably right about having no internal sponsor, but I'm sure you could find some people that still find an email client sexy. Old boring tech seems to get some modern, trendy traction every once in awhile; Google Inbox, Sparrow, Airmail. For awhile Twitter clients were pushing the boundaries of UX and recently chat applications seem to have steam.

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

#165

Post by AlbertoGP »

wrinkl3 wrote: post #154
DonHopkins wrote: post #143

The most practical, logical, obvious move would to be to reimplement Thunderbird as an Electron app. But of course that would be untenable for Mozilla because it would be admitting defeat to Chrome. The problem is that Mozilla has no alternative to Electron. There are a number of false starts and head fakes, but none of them have any buy in or support or future.

What would it take for Mozilla to build an Electron-like runtime with Firefox?

They tried: "This project is an Electron-compatible app shell for creating desktop apps based on Gecko, the rendering engine used in Firefox." https://github.com/mozilla/positron

but they failed: "As noted in the blog post Positron Discontinued [1], this project has been discontinued. The source remains available, and you're welcome to reuse it." [1] https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

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

#166

Post by AlbertoGP »

I'm considering applying for this as I use Thunderbird for all my email, wrote a couple of XUL applications years ago, and have an Upwork account, and the first thing I need to do is to see what the source code and build process looks like: I've built Firefox and FirefoxOS before, and it was not trivial.

Their post has nothing about that, and the Thunderbird page at Mozilla also has no "Developers", "Source code" or similar link anywhere. That should be there at least in the page footer.

Ok, so here is the Mercurial repo and build instructions: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

That link should be part of the job description.

The directory size (du -sh) is 148 MB after "hg clone", and 5.4 GB after "./client.py checkout".

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

#167

Post by DonHopkins »

AlbertoGP wrote: post #165
wrinkl3 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it take for Mozilla to build an Electron-like runtime with Firefox?

They tried: "This project is an Electron-compatible app shell for creating desktop apps based on Gecko, the rendering engine used in Firefox." https://github.com/mozilla/positron but they failed: "As noted in the blog post Positron Discontinued [1], this project has been discontinued. The source remains available, and you're welcome to reuse it." [1] https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

That's exactly what I meant by false starts and head fakes.

In fact, xulrunner was another much earlier attempt at developing an Electron-like platform, but Mozilla's heart just wasn't in it, and they didn't care about or adequately support third party developers who were trying to develop applications with it, like TomTom Home for example (which I worked on).

Xulrunner was never meant to be a platform for desktop or embedded apps the way WebKit was -- its singular purpose was to support the desktop version of Firefox.

Which is exactly how Thunderbird got into the hopeless dead-end situation it's in right now. Its best move would be to switch to Electron, which is impossible only because of the obvious political reasons.

There's no reason to expect Mozilla to ever support any other Electron-like platform any better than they did xulrunner.

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

#168

Post by DonHopkins »

Cyberdog wrote: post #94
tzahola wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and IMO HTML is light years ahead for UI LOL. Last time I checked you still couldn't make an image fill the available space while keeping its aspect ratio :D

img { width: 100%; height: auto; }

Cyberdog: Now THERE was a cool web browser, email and news client. OpenDoc FTW!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog

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

#169

Post by DonHopkins »

s73ver_ wrote: post #104

It'd be nice if they mentioned how much the position pays.

I asked around about that, and the consensus was: 'As far as paying contractors, the answer is probably "not enough", since they generally seem to consider "warm fuzzy feelings from working on the Open Web" to be part of compensation".'

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

#170

Post by nirv »

carussell wrote: post #106
dlandis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. Well it is only a six month contract for a single developer.

Sure, but the big thing is the "serious" part. We're basically talking about the patch paradox[1]. At any point in time, someone could have stepped up and made it known they were willing to do the necessary work to move off XUL. But without a similar commitment from upstream to accept a future involving a mail client built on web standard tech, it would be a wasted effort. Heck, Nylas even built their own such email…

There're many decent web-based proprietary mail solutions, and I was really excited once Nylas Mail showed up, even though it's Electron-based. And then instantly disappointed by its license. Later, I was considering switching to Nylas Mail when they re-licensed their open-source client, but turned out by "please use this" they still require you to opt-in with Nylas Identity tied to Nylas Cloud[1] They could only help replace free (from mail vendors) Thunderbird, playing by the rules of the Thunderbird.

[1] https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/3484

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