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Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

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

#21

Post by parennoob »

bshimmin wrote: post #16

The announcement from Mitchell Baker really is corporate drivel at its worst: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc... This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of signing and encrypting emails.

If you think that's corporate drivel at its worst, you haven't seen much corporate drivel. What's so bad about it? She is diplomatically trying to say, "Hey, we don't have the money or resources necessary to support Thunderbird, we're probably going to abandon it".

Open Source may be well and good but the engineers at Mozilla still have to earn money for their families. Look at the Corporation's Financial Statements (https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...) - they don't exactly show a company flush with cash that is pulling support for a product because they don't like it or something.

I like Enigmail though, just as you do, and tried introducing my family to it. Sadly that didn't stick :/

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

#22

Post by toyg »

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 are doing (Atom, VSCode etc etc). That's their world, that's what they like. An entire generation now exists, who learnt to code from web scripting rather than C or BASIC. They have taken over. It's just how it is.

(this said, I agree that donating to Mozilla feels a bit silly, looking at how much money they make from commercial agreements. It's like donating to Ubuntu or RedHat.)

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

#23

Post by pmontra »

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…

Even making sure that a program keeps compiling can be a big effort. Target platforms keep moving, toolchain changes, libraries die and must be replaced, it's not trivial.

I hope they find a way to manage all of that because I don't want to use web mail and I don't know of other equivalent clients on Linux.

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

#24

Post by J_Darnley »

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…

"Why you should donate to Mozilla" - A big thread from yesterday. This is why you shouldn't.

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

#26

Post by ZenoArrow »

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…

> " When you take an app that's been worked on for 15 or so years and then replace it's UI you're going to lose a TON of features. "

What makes you think they'll drop XUL as soon as the first release of the HTML-based UI? It's pretty obvious they'd want to support both until the HTML UI was close to feature complete. You're finding problems where there aren't any.

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

#27

Post by joonoro »

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 guys picked it up?), Mailpile [1] might have a chance to fill that gap. Other than that, there's always Claws Mail [2].

[0] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

[1] https://www.mailpile.is/

[2] http://www.claws-mail.org/

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

#29

Post by jacquesm »

mhb wrote: post #20
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…

I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing The forwarding/replying in plain vs. formatted text is pretty annoying.

Can you point me to the associated bug in bugzilla?

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

#30

Post by Natanael_L »

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…

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 addons relied on (things llike NoScript, Session Manager, Vimperator, uBlock, Tab Mix Plus, etc...) instead of just sticking with a blackbox rendering engine and settling with Chrome addon API parity.

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