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

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

#161

Post by mordocai » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:25 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #22

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…

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…

To be fair, what I have heard (I am not a Mozilla insider so I can't say personally) is that donations go to the Mozilla Foundation and the commercial agreements give money to Mozilla Corporation. So you aren't donating to the same place.

From the same source, apparently the Mozilla Foundation does a lot of important work that the Mozilla Corporation can't/won't do but most of the development is done by the Mozilla Corporation currently (possibly due to not enough donations to the Foundation?).

I haven't really verified that, but thought it was worth pointing out.

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

#162

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:26 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #34

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…

> 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.

What bothers me about being older is my first browser was Internet Explorer, then I got to play with MOSAIC's slow arse in school, then used Opera/Mozilla, and so on. Got to see where it came from. And the new stuff, especially Firefox, is coming full circle in how friggin' slow they run to serve the lowest common denominator of web pages.

It's annoying. I miss Web 1.0. Add just a bit of dynamic functionality plus broadband and it would be fine for 80-90% of cases. And FAST!

Instead, we get Web 2.0, 3.0 (4?) which makes pages on 40-50Mbps load like my old 28Kbps modem on AOL. Seriously...?

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

#163

Post by baldfat » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #62

cubano wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stick around for another 25 like I have...the fun is just starting!

Fun as in yelling at people to get off my digital, hand-optimized assembly lawn?

Written and read in hex code

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

#164

Post by feld » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #131

creshal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "enterprise-ready" you mean "slow, bloated, and byzantine", then yes, it fits that ecosystem perfectly. But despite being a single-threaded, half-XML-half-C cancerous pile of dirty hacks, Thunderbird is still faster and more stable – not to mention more extensible – than Evolution could ever hope to be.

God, I hope the Unix people abandon C and start using Rust. It's going to raise the quality of open source desktop applications so much. Or, well, it'll at least be the first clear improvement in many decades.

Are you so daft to think that the rust compiler is written in something other than C/C++?

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

#165

Post by bad_user » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

joonoro wrote: post #27

Funny I should see this today, I spent yesterday afternoon reading articles about Thunderbird and other mail clients and ended up migrating from Thunderbird to mu4e [0] (purely for reasons of usability). If this is true (and there is some reason to doubt it, as this isn't the first time Thunderbird has been declared "dead"), and considering that Geary is no longer in active development either (maybe the Elementary OS…

Development by Mozilla has been stopped since 2012, which means that Thunderbird has been relying on community support for maintenance and new features, Mozilla still contributing security updates. For details see here: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

Development has been slow since then, but the project is far from dead. I'm on version 42 beta (latest Firefox is 43 I think) and for example they've just includes the Lighting add-on in the base install. Plus all add-ons that interest me are compatible, like Markdown-here.

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

#166

Post by izacus » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #79

ZenoArrow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS" Why is that crazy? Makes perfect sense to me, especially as the performance of the programming language element improves. Ultimately these IDEs are sure to make use of WebAssembly, which should take away the remaining performance concerns.

It's crazy because, apart from performance concerns (it looks like we love to make our computers slower and slower every 10 years), you're just discarding all the features of the containing desktop OS. Formatted copypasting, usability features, network features, etc etc... you'll have to reimplement them all, solving all the problems that systems developers solved 10 or 20 years ago. The OS will become little more th…

Not to mention death of accessibility features - those HTML apps are effectively unusable for disabled users because they don't implement accessibilty features available in native UIs.

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

#167

Post by a3n » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

I dislike every email client I've used. I dislike Tbird the least.

If Tbird doesn't survive this transition, I've thought in the past of using something like Mutt, with to display rendered html, and to compose html mail.

And for calendar access to my fastmail calendar.

Any suggestions for any of those things?

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

#168

Post by DonHopkins » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #130

emidln wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Much as i despise HTML UIs (see reasoning my rant below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655606 ), it is relevant and XUL is horrible. I'm glad to see it disappear, it's one of those things the world doesn't need. A failed experiment. And an HTML UI for firefox makes sense in the long run. Fun fact of the day: Did you know XUL uses DTD to store translations? That's right, if you have a string you want to transl…

I was just going to mention that, but you beat me to it. It's just bizarre to use XML external entities for internationalization.

I worked on TomTom Home, which was implemented in xulrunner, and I developed some internationalization/localization tools that had to deal with XUL DTDs as well as several other different and incompatible file formats for storing translations. I could never for the life of me figure out why they decided to use DTDs with external entities for translations.

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

#169

Post by oneJob » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

If this was an open source "project", rather than a "foundation" whose mission is to build a better web for its users, I'd say it was their call and that's the beauty of OSS. This is not that.

This is another decision in a long string of decisions which are either not in their users' interest, questionable, or poorly communicated and implemented.

If I were to give the benefit of the doubt here over the question of whose interest this is in (Mozilla or its users) it is still being horribly communicated (otherwise one might better understand why it's in one's interest) and horribly implemented, to the point which I'm beginning to question whether Mozilla, as an organization, is up to the task of building a better web for its users.

Why not more discussion around Pocket, the new tab page, Thunderbird support, etc. Why pop these decisions, fully made, on their user base? And why not, in the case of XUL, incrementally replace features or develop in parallel until a drop-in, validated solution exists.

To me, one of two things is going on. Either Mozilla is not acting in the best interest of its users or this is amateur hour. Both scenarios suck.

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

#170

Post by aikah » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 3:33 PM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #153

toyg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy because, apart from performance concerns (it looks like we love to make our computers slower and slower every 10 years), you're just discarding all the features of the containing desktop OS. Formatted copypasting, usability features, network features, etc etc... you'll have to reimplement them all, solving all the problems that systems developers solved 10 or 20 years ago. The OS will become little more th…

So we finally have a free choice of OS. It's not the full story to complain about people solving the problems that the OS side had already solved decades ago. The big new thing is that they are doing so in a platform agnostic way. That I have nine different virtual machines installed on four different operating systems and the same code base can run on all of them smoothly.

> So we finally have a free choice of OS

Not really, you still a browser that implement all this stuff. The only difference is Open tech vs proprietary.

Open technologies are obviously a good thing. Writing a software as complex as Photoshop for instance with the exact same features with HTML/CSS and JavaScript isn't going to fly and be usable for someone who has to work 10 hours a day on it. The performance issues will be significant. It's not a big deal for an text editor though I still can't open a 5mb log file in Atom for some reasons. No problem with Sublime Text 2 or Vim. Why is this ?

My point is Web techs aren't a silver bullet.