Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#101

Post by silon7 » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:31 PM UTC

simpleigh wrote: post #57

betteringred wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for writing new apps in HTML, I think Atom and VSCode are awesome, but I'm not for rewriting huge legacy apps to be HTML apps for no good reason. The reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers don't enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain XUL is less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML. No one has listed the ten awesome features that we'…

> The reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers don't enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain XUL is less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML. Ah, but maintaining XUL means working on old code (which is boring), but moving Firefox to HTML means working on new shiny code (which is exciting). https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Killing XUL has the potential of killing Firefox. I bet the last good XUL version will be forked.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#102

Post by rplnt » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:31 PM UTC

castell wrote: post #88

betteringred wrote: post #17

They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (l…

I welcome a Servo based browser with an HTML UI. An one-page email app running on Servo that is inspired by GMails interface would be great. At the moment I use Thunderbird, Outlook 2010 and GMail. Outlook has good calendar integration and GMail the better tagging, search function and UX. Opera 12 had an inbuilt HTML+JS based email client. Moving to Chrome/Blink with Opera 15 they stopped shipping the inbuilt email c…

Was it really HTML+JS? Because it was fast, many years back (used it just as an RSS reader though). Also, they shipped it as a standalone product[1], but I don't think it ever got updated after that.

1. http://www.opera.com/computer/mail

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#103

Post by espadrine » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

betteringred wrote: post #17

They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (l…

XUL was a weight on developing for Firefox. It worked like HTML, but was nonstandard. At first, it meant they could quickly implement things like flexbox ( / ) and gridlayout () long before they were a thing in CSS.

But as HTML and CSS slowly got more features than XUL, XUL development slowed down, up to the point where writing the Firefox UI in XUL became a pain because of poor tooling and sneaky bugs. More and more pieces of Firefox got written in HTML inside XUL, and factorizing code between the pieces in XUL and those in HTML was nightmarish.

Dropping XUL means putting those bugs and issues behind us, and focusing development on a single DOM language. You would probably be surprised by how much of the UI already is in HTML; tab groups is almost all HTML, and the DevTools' editor and DOM inspector are in HTML as well.

As for donating to Mozilla, the distinction between Mozilla Corp and Mozilla Foundation is understandably complex for outsiders, but basically only Mozilla Corp makes money from the partnerships.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#104

Post by castell » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #65

pmelendez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good thing (I think) of a generalist is that one is used to adapt, but yeah... it gets boring sometime. Although after a while, is interesting to see how we reinvent wheels and show them with a new fancy name, it is a pattern that you would see more or less each 10 years. Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's.

> Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's. Reading up on the capabilities of early mainframes is eye-opening if you (like me) grew up on Pentiums.

Yes, especially the MULTICS operating system was so advanced and dozens of decades ahead that we still borrow from its concepts. It had for example 16 security rings. Intel CPUs support only 4 CPU rings, and Windows e.g. uses only 2 rings (for kernel mode and user mode) (hypervisor mode uses another ring in recent iterations).

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#105

Post by rplnt » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

lsh wrote: post #78

Natanael_L wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivaldi seems neat, which is essentially Chromium with a HTML5 GUI built by the old Opera folks intended to restore the best features of old Opera, with a heavy focus on customization. My hope is that Mozilla will take the direction of using Servo to build something Vivaldi-like (instead of everybody running with Webkit/Blink) and start to restore old API:s and frameworks from old XUL-Firefox that all the best old ad…

I do believe Otter is doing a better job of restoring Opera's past glory, feature-wise. Vivaldi, even with it's HTML gui feels like another opera/chrome/chromium derivative. Plug: http://otter-browser.org/

They still suffer from the "different" rendering engine. Some things, it seems, can't be achieved beyond that.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#106

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

danellis wrote: post #93

toyg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, you're likely typing on the "wrong" keyboard layout and use a "wrong" calendar... convention trumps correctness pretty much all the time. What matters is that enough people are doing it to make it "the way". I fully expect that we will eventually see a Javascript OS, because "it's so much easier to maintain".

We won't, because you can't write an OS in JavaScript; you need native code. Maybe a desktop environment or something, but not an OS.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#107

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #15

Thunderbird has been my email client ever since I used unix as my day-to-day platform and it's a real pity that Mozilla stops maintenance but on the whole it doesn't need that much maintenance. It just works, I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing. Just keep it as it is and I'm perfectly ok with it. If mozilla did the same with FireFox a and would focus on long t…

> If mozilla did the same with FireFox a and would focus on long term stability and bug fixing rather than grafting new parts onto it and re-writing old parts that are working just fine I'd be OK with that too.

Although I agree 100% with the sentiment, the trouble with this approach is that the web moves much quicker than email.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#108

Post by icebraining » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

danellis wrote: post #93

toyg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, you're likely typing on the "wrong" keyboard layout and use a "wrong" calendar... convention trumps correctness pretty much all the time. What matters is that enough people are doing it to make it "the way". I fully expect that we will eventually see a Javascript OS, because "it's so much easier to maintain".

We won't, because you can't write an OS in JavaScript; you need native code. Maybe a desktop environment or something, but not an OS.

All languages can be compiled to native code, it's just harder for some. For example, here's an AOT compiler for JS: https://github.com/tmikov/jscomp

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#109

Post by lmm » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

gryph0n wrote: post #67

mverwijs wrote: post #25

Anyone know how this impacts the e-mail functionality of Seamonkey? (I've actually started using Seamonkey again on a whim. The last couple of weeks. Somehow, browsing feels more snappy with Seamonkey than with Firefox.)

What a circle that would be !!! Phoenix (later, again renamed to Firefox) was originally split off from Mozilla/Netscape Navigator since the 'suite' was presumably slow.

Seamonkey was faster in a matter of months. If you stop messing with a piece of software, Moore's law soon makes it blazing fast.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#110

Post by vdaniuk » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

Kunix wrote: post #91

creshal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing I'm 25 and I feel to old for this industry already.

I am 29, started coding at 14, I've built UIs based on mIRC Scripting, VB/Winforms, C++/Qt, C#/WPF, Java/Android layouts. Using IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Qt Creator and Android Studio. I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that: - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Component…

The fact that you are being(edit: was) downvoted for constructive opinion shows unwarranted prejudice of HN hivemind towards web technologies. HN discussions on this topic are effectively useless, any constructive truth finding is drowned.

edit: I'll take my downvotes with pleasure. The fact that I am able to use Atom or Nylas N1 or Nuclide on linux with 0 problems alone is enough to welcome proliferation of web tech on desktop.