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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#81

Post by 0des »

ryanleesipes wrote: post #70
xg15 wrote: post #38

I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products. The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough: > The Thunderbi…

Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve…

> It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned

Nothing in this world is purely altruistic. If it didn't make business sense, this wouldn't be happening. Please surprise me and stay true to your word on this.

> The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.

We are all from the internet here, you know exactly why we are this way. Even if true, please understand why your words are perceived this way.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#82

Post by longrod »

prophesi wrote: post #74
longrod wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A full detailed list: https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+101,chrome+102&compareC...

I don't think this proves Firefox is dying. A better indicator would be Chrome's past decade of 90%+ browser market share. It's also worth noting that a good amount of the features not implemented in Firefox are either Chrome-specific experiments, or features purposefully unimplemented for privacy purposes. If anything, it shows the damage of a browser-tech monopoly which Edge and Brave aren't helping with.

I don't think features such as Web USB, Web Bluetooth are privacy invasive. Chrome's huge market share is the very reason Firefox isn't trying very hard here. They are playing catch up. Take Manifest v3 for example; Chrome introduced it quite a while ago and made it mandatory for new extensions in 2022. Firefox just started catching up.

This is bad for Firefox because developers will eventually (and some still do) will simply stop supporting Firefox due it being so slow to catch up. Chrome already has such a huge market that a lot of web devs already don't care (e.g. Microsoft Teams).

What does this signify? It's the death of Firefox unless Firefox pulls a miracle here. Chrome is leading, all the devs are following, and they leading by leaps and bounds. Firefox is forced to catch up which causes frustration among users.

How long before Firefox gets tired of playing catch up and simply becomes irrelevant?

I am not happy about this. This is clearly bad but inevitable. The only other real competitor is WebKit which is restricted to Apple only. A huge market still. But Google's monopoly over the browsing market will only cause harm in the long run. Even though it will make devs jobs a lot easier.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#83

Post by sam_lowry_ »

subsection1h wrote: post #59
javajosh wrote: post #25

As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, it…

> An email client should be a webview + sql-lite, no? I strongly prefer Maildir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

Maildir vs mbox is like emacs vs vim.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#84

Post by mook »

mempko wrote: post #52
javajosh wrote: post #25

As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, it…

Thunderbird is built on top of a browser. Most code for it's functionality isn't C++. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Last I checked (which was a while ago), while the UI is in XUL / JavaScript, the bulk of the mail handling (POP/IMAP/SMTP, MIME parsing, etc.) was still in C++ that was extremely complex and hard to port to JavaScript. There was an attempt to rebuild a mail client in JS for FirefoxOS (the mobile phone thing that is now mostly KaiOS), but that's not used in Thunderbird as far as I know.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#85

Post by Zak »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6
emodendroket wrote: post #3

Hate to be a stick in the mud, but I worry about a loss of focus when Thunderbird is one of the few in a dying category on the desktop, which is much less true on mobile.

The two work in tandem, though. I use Firefox on mobile because I use Firefox on desktop. That and it being the only Android browser that runs uBlock Origin, of course. I currently use Thunderbird on desktop, but use a combination of Gmail and Outlook on Android. If Thunderbird picks up K-9 mail and turns it into a first-class mobile client, I'll probably use Thunderbird instead of the Outlook app. People like consis…

> That and it being the only Android browser that runs uBlock Origin, of course.

There's also Kiwi. It runs pretty much any extension available for Desktop Chromium.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#86

Post by Taywee »

xg15 wrote: post #61
happyopossum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against? Umm, no? There's never been a rule about an app developer selling their app/company - that'd be pretty badly restrictive.

I don't think the selling part is the problem (per se), I mean the app becoming something completely different after the acquisition, which users never consciously installed.

Is there anything in the announcement that says that people who installed K-9 mail would find that it has silently turned into Thunderbird? I'd assume this would involve a separate install, as it'll probably have a separate app ID indicating the Thunderbird connection.

In any case, I've had installed apps have the name change as a part of rebranding before. It's a little bit jarring sometimes, but name changes happen. They're usually small name changes, but I don't thing taking "K-9 mail is continuing development with a new name" as "app becoming something completely different" is really fair. Unless the functionality and UX completely changes, I don't think it's fair to read a name change as something so negative that needs to be "protected against".

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#88

Post by jcranmer »

javajosh wrote: post #25

As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, it…

> Surely there is a space for minimalist office suites and email clients, written starting with a browser as a jumping off point, rather than a compiler?

As far as email clients go, Thunderbird is literally what you are suggesting. Thunderbird is essentially the Firefox web browser, with all of the browser front-end code stripped off, and an email client dropped in its place.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#90

Post by lock-the-spock »

longrod wrote: post #21
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two work in tandem, though. I use Firefox on mobile because I use Firefox on desktop. That and it being the only Android browser that runs uBlock Origin, of course. I currently use Thunderbird on desktop, but use a combination of Gmail and Outlook on Android. If Thunderbird picks up K-9 mail and turns it into a first-class mobile client, I'll probably use Thunderbird instead of the Outlook app. People like consis…

Firefox is a dying horse on its last throes before Hades claims it for its own. Mythology aside, I find it truly sad to see the state Firefox is in. A browser is an incredibly complex piece of software and what Mozilla did with Firefox is nothing short of brilliant. Alas, they have been left too far behind [0] I am afraid they'll no longer be relevant in a few years. Every few months Mozilla tries to overhaul it's UI…

I find Firefox absolutely marvelous in the state it is in now. There certainly is no mystical death.
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