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Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

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Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#41
post #10
post #5

I really love Thunderbird; I've been using it for at least a decade now. There are definitely places where it still needs improvement, after years and years. While Betterbird seems exciting in theory, the attitude of the project leader (who it seems is a banned former contributor to Mozilla Thunderbird), and honestly even the arrogance in the name itself gives me pause. The issues laid out in this[0] email thread are…

Being banned from Mozilla is actually sort of endorsement for me :) I was worried this project is just repacked Thunderbird, with malware. This makes it more legit. Also some people do not like politics in Mozilla Corp. Firefox is supposed to be privacy focused, yet it uses Google for search, CEO salaries, scraping promising tech etc... I use Brave browser, created by a guy who was also banned from Mozilla, it works…

I cannot find any search result that slightly or strongly support your claim that "Brave browser creator was banned from Mozilla".

Any links?

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#42
While I don’t have insight into the ban of this particular member, I can’t fail to notice a growing list of people leaving Mozilla sometimes abruptly, without a lot of explanations and where relations with management seems to play a significant role. Graydon Hoare comes to mind. I also remember the interaction between the community and the fenix team feeling frankly tense if not hostile.

Has something been happening at Mozilla for the past few years or am I paranoid?

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#43
post #28

I tried Thunderbird again after around 5 years, and it immediately ate up around 10GB of disk space. Despite having a limit set in prefs. Anyone know how to use Thunderbird with Google Mail in a way that doesn’t do this?

Don't relay on any MUA outside owns Google ones. Gmail is making changes to IMAP standard.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#44
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did something like that happen with ffmpeg a few years back? A huge amount of the dev work was being done by one at-the-time abrasive guy. They booted him, he forked, the ffmpeg mainline went moribund while the fork line kept getting better. Apparently he is back with mainline now. I hope things are mended but I didn't pay attention. As for Thunderbird: I use it, but it seems like its dev decisions are often wedged i…

> the ffmpeg mainline went moribund Never. FFmpeg was actively rebase-merging Libav changes, but not vice-versa. Libav devs wanted to focus on API clean-up and harmonization, FFmpeg usually prioritized new features. Major Libav dev activity more or less died by 2017.

[deleted]

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#45
post #24

It's usually not a good idea to position your product's entire value prop as "better than x" What happens when X actually improves? Then the whole reason for your existence evapourates.

> What happens when X actually improves? Then the whole reason for your existence evapourates.

Sounds like the developers would consider it a win-win situation.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#46
post #41
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being banned from Mozilla is actually sort of endorsement for me :) I was worried this project is just repacked Thunderbird, with malware. This makes it more legit. Also some people do not like politics in Mozilla Corp. Firefox is supposed to be privacy focused, yet it uses Google for search, CEO salaries, scraping promising tech etc... I use Brave browser, created by a guy who was also banned from Mozilla, it works…

I cannot find any search result that slightly or strongly support your claim that "Brave browser creator was banned from Mozilla". Any links?

It's complicated.

Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, long-time Mozilla developer, long-time Mozilla CTO, briefly Mozilla CEO.

Brendan Eich also happened to be an anti-gay-marriage activist and donator (afaik, only his spare time, not at work) and California law says that if you donate more than [some sum of money], you must specify your employer. So, suddenly, a few days after Brendan Eich was nominated CEO, someone on Twitter published the records of Brendan Eich's donation, phrasing it as "Mozilla is donating against gay rights", or something like that. A shitstorm started, including death threats against Mozilla employees, a highly hypocritical PR campaign by OKCupid (whose CEO was member of the same political circles as Brendan Eich) to boycott Mozilla, etc. Brendan Eich was convinced to resign from Mozilla after about two weeks of this.

That's probably what GP calls "banned from Mozilla".

Of course, after this, US Conservatives rephrased this into "Mozilla is persecuting Christians", so the death threats continued, just from the other side.

Source: I was there.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#47
post #41
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being banned from Mozilla is actually sort of endorsement for me :) I was worried this project is just repacked Thunderbird, with malware. This makes it more legit. Also some people do not like politics in Mozilla Corp. Firefox is supposed to be privacy focused, yet it uses Google for search, CEO salaries, scraping promising tech etc... I use Brave browser, created by a guy who was also banned from Mozilla, it works…

I cannot find any search result that slightly or strongly support your claim that "Brave browser creator was banned from Mozilla". Any links?

I think he is referring to the massive fallout after Brendan Eich (one of the founders of Mozilla and now founder of Brave) donated some money to a socially conservative political campaign (I forgot what one).

Brendan "quit" Mozilla, but many people consider that he was kinda forced to quit.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#48
post #41
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being banned from Mozilla is actually sort of endorsement for me :) I was worried this project is just repacked Thunderbird, with malware. This makes it more legit. Also some people do not like politics in Mozilla Corp. Firefox is supposed to be privacy focused, yet it uses Google for search, CEO salaries, scraping promising tech etc... I use Brave browser, created by a guy who was also banned from Mozilla, it works…

I cannot find any search result that slightly or strongly support your claim that "Brave browser creator was banned from Mozilla". Any links?

Brendan Eich - wasn't banned per se, but resigned as CEO of Mozilla after it came to light he'd donated to a cause supporting the ban of same-sex marriage. This is all on Wikipedia.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#49

While I don’t have insight into the ban of this particular member, I can’t fail to notice a growing list of people leaving Mozilla sometimes abruptly, without a lot of explanations and where relations with management seems to play a significant role. Graydon Hoare comes to mind. I also remember the interaction between the community and the fenix team feeling frankly tense if not hostile. Has something been happening…

Google invests at least one order of magnitude more money in Chrome than Mozilla can afford to invest in Firefox. Google has attracted many Firefox developers, both employees and external contributors. Chrome has reduced the browser share of Firefox to a few meager percent. All of this is bad for morale (and finances), it's as simple as that.

Also, the failure of Firefox OS and Mozilla Connected Devices didn't help, nor did a few rounds of layoffs,

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#50
post #5

I really love Thunderbird; I've been using it for at least a decade now. There are definitely places where it still needs improvement, after years and years. While Betterbird seems exciting in theory, the attitude of the project leader (who it seems is a banned former contributor to Mozilla Thunderbird), and honestly even the arrogance in the name itself gives me pause. The issues laid out in this[0] email thread are…

The bug chart thing also seems a bit misleading. If you actually click through the links it looks like there's simply more people dedicated to the task of testing dev releases. This person made a public stink about how they were ignored about getting a QA team and now it seems as though they have it? And thus they're claiming that that means the software is buggier rather than more bugs are being caught earlier in th…

Also, i see bugs like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1744944 They remove the annoying message with a patch, but it doesn't fix the root issue, which in fact is now resolved in the main project (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429491).
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