Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 443 posts

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

#141

Post by ausjke »

ausjke wrote: post #118

Sad to hear, Thunderbird has been my major and actually sole email client for a few years, not a Windows user so outlook is out, do I have to use mutt from now on? On Android I use K-9 which works well, it seems for Desktop the web email will be my only choice, not good at all.

anyone used this fork: http://www.fossamail.org/ ?

I don't mind paying for Thunderbird, hope someone picks up the development. Firefox is great but there are alternatives, Thunderbird is great and _unique_ (across platform and an overall good product), I somehow feel Thuderbird is of more use to me than Firefox itself.

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

#142

Post by stronglikedan »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #45
crististm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been brainwashed about the "community" stuff. Mozilla _is_ a corporation. Linux is built by a corporation. Last time I checked, less than 18% of Linux patches were from independent contributors. Everything big enough to be known by Joe average hobbyist is built by a corporation. Let's see the community in action taking the lead when Mozilla drops the ball.

What features are you missing from Thunderbird?

The ability to show all events for the current day in the Today Pane. It only shows events at or past the current time. I've looked everywhere for an option.

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

#143

Post by bad_user »

dspillett wrote: post #94

Your link redirects people to a "no hotlinking" image when used directly. For those affected: if you find the page in Google by searching for "The CADT Model" it does let you see the content via that route.

Or just copy/paste the link.

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

#144

Post by Certhas »

betteringred wrote: post #38
toyg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. 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…

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'…

As an active user of Thunderbird I am very disappointed with these news.

But these rants are just silly. XUL is a technology that needlessly duplicates what HTML/CSS do these days. And if you ever want to have a smooth transition to servo, which solves real, deep problems, having a html UI is going to be dramatically important.

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

#145

Post by kspaans »

bigquestion wrote: post #89
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.

So this generation is rewriting everything that was made and working in the 90s. Was everything written in the 90s also a rehash of stuff from the 70s/80s? Just curious, what was the equivalent of HTML/CSS/JS in the 80s?

Mainframes and thin clients maybe? "All of the computing power will be over here, and the clients will be dumb and just render stuff!"

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

#146

Post by hrnnnnnn »

andresmanz wrote: post #80
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.

Same here, I'm 26. The industry has changed a lot when people realized you could make a shitload of money with the web/scripting stuff. Coding schools, open source communities and huge companies love HTML and JavaScript and Python and Ruby for their simplicity. Just take a bunch of people, tell them they could make a lot of money by learning some dead simple languages and there you go. Doesn't matter if they write th…

Obligatory because of "real programming" reference:

https://xkcd.com/378/

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

#147

Post by pmelendez »

bigquestion wrote: post #89
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.

So this generation is rewriting everything that was made and working in the 90s. Was everything written in the 90s also a rehash of stuff from the 70s/80s? Just curious, what was the equivalent of HTML/CSS/JS in the 80s?

> what was the equivalent of HTML/CSS/JS in the 80s?

Depends what are looking as an equivalent. Browsers didn't exists but markup languages have been around since the 70's (mentioned for first time in late 60's)[1]

Maybe an equivalent to express GUI as resources? yeah, we called it RAD back in the day and they were quit popular among some circles. Does somebody remember Hypercard? Or even the first versions of Visual Basic?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language#History

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

#148

Post by acdha »

72deluxe wrote: post #52
chillingeffect wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, Ah yes, thank you for the reminder! http://imgur.com/hLZp8SG Now that I actually have a career and money I have no problem giving back. I'm glad I can donate to Ubuntu and Wikipedia nowadays. I am grateful for everything Firefox has given me for well over 10 years... I really don't know what XUL is (intermediate language between HTML and FF UI?), but I guess I do feel sorry…

Why rewrite it in another language? It isn't currently broken. Things that are not broken do not need rewriting.

> Why rewrite it in another language? It isn't currently broken.

You need to support that claim. The people who actually work on Firefox have a list of reasons why they made this decision:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Why are we to believe that you are better qualified to make that call?

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

#149

Post by espadrine »

emidln wrote: post #116
espadrine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

> It worked like HTML, but was nonstandard. Being nonstandard is completely irrelevant here. Firefox's UI doesn't need to be rendered by Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.

> Being nonstandard is completely irrelevant here

It was meant as a pro. Since it was their own language, they could do anything with it. They could make a better HTML.

But HTML caught up. Currently, I believe HTML is better than XUL, and making XUL great again is both a silly reuse of a political slogan and a waste of effort.

I for one would rather see efforts made to allow CSS styling of all input elements in HTML.

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

#150

Post by pmlnr »

haddr wrote: post #32
Cyph0n wrote: post #2

That's really sad to hear. It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. The best solution imo is to just let the community take over.

Geary email client is a really quite nice and fresh alternative recently. Although not that advanced and mature, but a pleasure to use...

> not that advanced and mature, but a pleasure to use...

No encryption, no CardDav, no Sieve support. Yes, I need plugins for this in Thunderbird, but I can have them if I want to. geary is also hectic on which distribution/release is supported.

The user interface is nice though.

Post reply on HN