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Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

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Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#111

Post by BorisMelnik »

cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

I like it, and it is usable. But I don't use it because I want to be able to have the same email interface wherever I go (my Android, laptop, TV, and PC). I think it would be a good idea to have a portable / web version. It could be one more thing that keeps Mozilla alive / ahead (speaking as an outsider / user).

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#112

Post by Silhouette »

norea-armozel wrote: post #108
Silhouette wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "not invented here" mentality has to stop. This is true, but the track record of bugs and poor security inherent in using relatively low-level languages like C and C++ for everyday Internet-connected applications also has to stop.

That doesn't really help you when the platform you run on be it a browser or a virtual machine is written in C/C++ which by implication can be exposed to the same security flaws if/when they utilize unsafe design patterns or idioms. So, all you've done is pass the buck onto Servo/Gecko/Safari. The reality is that you can't make an argument that's ironclad in favor of forcing JS to become the new C. Let JS do it's won…

I didn't say anything about using JS as the alternative. I happen to think it's a rather poor language and that using it for anything other than running front-end code on a web site until we have better alternatives is usually a mistake. But there are a lot more languages out there than C, C++ and JS, and I don't think any of those is a particularly good choice for this sort of task.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#113

Post by jcranmer »

Silhouette wrote: post #110
jcranmer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I don't immediately understand is why they can't just fork Gecko and continue using it for their own purposes. Apparently the needs of Firefox and Thunderbird have diverged, and Mozilla seem to have little interest in supporting Thunderbird any more, so is it a crazy idea to just separate the projects completely and avoid the whole issue indefinitely? Short answer: security bugs. Gecko has too high of a code c…

That makes a lot of sense if we're talking about using Gecko to render the contents of arbitrary HTML emails. However, this proposal seems to be about problems supporting the UI itself and proposing a move to some other JS+HTML rendering system as an alternative. At first glance, that appears to be a separate issue, other than both types of functionality possibly relying on Gecko today and rendering engines being qui…

Gecko is actually quite difficult to embed (Mozilla more or less gave up on there existing non-Firefox/Thunderbird embeddings around 2011 or so).

There's a lot of low-level interfaces and design decisions that filter through Thunderbird, for example networking interfaces. Once you talk about moving to a different rendering engine for the UI, you're more or less talking about ripping out ¾ of the backend code or so anyways.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#114

Post by frik »

cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

What I want is a GMail client on premise. An open source clone of the GMail Android app or webapp running in Electro or Servo. GMail has a perfect conversation-style UI. Even today Outlook, Windows Mail, Thunderbird have no equivalent conversation view (just hacked together additions that don't work). Also GMail introduced the concept of tags instead of lame folders (an email can be tagged with several tags). Also GMail syncs notes and calender with CalDAV and other open protocols. It works fine out of the box with iOS. Even the notes app syncs data to GMail IMAP out of the box.

The old Opera 12 browser featured such a similar HTML based email client. Vivaldi promised such a email client, but no news for years.

Thunderbird is like Outlook Express aka Windows Mail (Windows Vista/7/8) (both deprecated), Outlook's little brother.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#115

Post by nguillaumin »

That is awesome! I actually toyed with the same idea a couple of months ago and started a prototype, but in the end it was too much work for a single developer (having to implement IMAP/POP backends, etc. in addition to the UI).

Using web technologies for desktop apps is not ideal, but at the same time it's probably the easiest way these days to build cross-platform apps because of the lack of a good cross-platform UI toolkit.

A big benefit I see is that it will make it very hackable as a lot of developers are familiar with web technologies. That should be a good way to get a lot of contributors to implement features and innovate (See for example the community / contributions around Visual Studio Code).

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#116

Post by jcranmer »

hilbert42 wrote: post #95
cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

Hum, it would be interesting to know how you use it (with respect, I'd suggest you have very basic email needs). For me Thunderbird is badly broken. This is not the place to list bugs, issues, limitations etc. in any detail but there are very many indeed (so I'll only provide a skeletal outline of them here). Frankly, on occasions, I find Thunderbird is unusable for some jobs and I end up using either an ancient copy…

Re the editor, the Gecko editor component has long been plagued with the issue that the module owner didn't really want to hold that position. For a time, the owner was completely hostile to anything Thunderbird, despite the fact that Thunderbird was the heaviest and most notable implementation of the editor.

I will also point out that there is actually some fairly deep integration code within the Mozilla editor with Thunderbird's compose backend (particularly in regards to the need to generate inline embedded images). There have been attempts to replace the editor with a more functional one in the past, but they all came to naught.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#117

Post by frik »

jancsika wrote: post #44

> We must pay attention to also keep technical qualities that many of our users rely on. An obvious one is that the new implementation must be able to quickly scroll through a list of up to 100000 messages. Does any cross-platform GUI toolkit have a widget that can handle this with sane defaults?

> quickly scroll through a list of up to 100000 messages.

You can do this with JS and HTML. There are some popular small JS libs that do just that.

It works like this: it creates a div with a very big "height" value to get the scrollbar look like there is a long list, and JS just loads in the visible area plus a few items above and below, and reloads data as you scroll. It works very good in Chrome and Firefox, and even okay in IE11.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#118

Post by _greim_ »

cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

It's either done or it isn't.

If it's done, it isn't going away, just keep using the same binary forever.

If it isn't done—i.e. if it needs porting to new platforms, security patches, bug fixes, etc.—then there needs to be people who interested and invested in the codebase, both at Mozilla and the OSS community. Which means having a path into the future.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#119

Post by Certhas »

Silhouette wrote: post #83
Certhas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not, but from the sound of it, a rewrite is necessary just to keep the lights on and to keep Thunderbird compiling in the long run.

What I don't immediately understand is why they can't just fork Gecko and continue using it for their own purposes. Apparently the needs of Firefox and Thunderbird have diverged, and Mozilla seem to have little interest in supporting Thunderbird any more, so is it a crazy idea to just separate the projects completely and avoid the whole issue indefinitely? Changing the UIs within this particular family of software pr…

As a result of this thread I have tried the Nylas mail client which has a javascript UI, and I am very pleasantly surprised by just how smooth the UI is.

Honestly, if I could use it without a Nylas account I would very seriously consider it as a Thunderbird replacement.

From reading the original email thread it also looks like the Thunderbird guys are paying attention to Nylas.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#120

Post by JadeNB »

cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

Since this thread is (probably predictably) "what I don't like about Thunderbird", I don't have the problems that others are having with the search algorithm per se; but, after finding mails, it refuses to show them to me. It correctly shows me snippets from the mails that it finds, but, when I try to access those mails, it just shows me a blank window.

(It also refuses to acknowledge deleted and created folders on my work account, but, not knowing the actual cause, I am very happy to suppose that the blame lies on some administrator at work making some hostile-to-non-Outlook-users change in OWA setting.)

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