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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

#351

Post by bad_user »

agopaul wrote: post #325
islandtech wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Webmail or IMAP mail, look no further than Fastmail. These guys know exactly what they are doing with IMAP and they can easily accomodate your multiple accounts. I've been a Fastmail user for almost a decade. I've never been happier with any email provider (or any provider, to be honest). You pay for the service, but it's worth the money and more. You are treated like a valued customer and the support, if needed,…

How does it compare to, say, Gmail enterprise? Well, apart from the whole Google Apps. I'm curious because we'll have to migrate to a better email provider in a month or two, and Gmail enterprise seemed to be the best fit for us (price, storage, good iOS app to leverage push notifications, etc).

Google's apps for iOS are subpar compared to its Android counterparts, or even to other iOS apps. I'm a heavy Android user, but on my new iPhone I actually prefer the native email app, because it is simple, effective, more standards complaint than Gmail and has quick swipe actions for both delete and archive, which is all I need.

On push, Google Apps gives you ActiveSync as a protocol, as an alternative to IMAP. But the integration with iOS Mail is weird and I could not use it.

But FastMail on the other hand, in a twisted turn of events supports push through Apple's own APN, getting the same treatment as iCloud: https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-availabl...

FastMail also has a native app that does push notifications, but it's just the packaged web interacts with push notifications added. This is both good and bad. It's good because the mobile web interface is very decent, compared to Gmail, and this means you always have a decent UI on whatever OS you have. It's bad because it doesn't feel native, but then there's nothing more native than the iOS Mail app.

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

#353

Post by danellis »

adrianN wrote: post #203
danellis wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a scripting language, and you still can't write an OS in it. There's no low-level access to the hardware. You could of course write all the low level parts in C, but then you haven't written an OS in JavaScript.

C also doesn't have low level access to the hardware. The interesting bits of the OS are written in assembly.

I think the only bit that really needs to be in assembly is the context switch, but even that can be embedded in the C (which you might consider cheating, but isn't even an option in JavaScript).

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

#354

Post by nickpsecurity »

agentgt wrote: post #272
hga wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely wasn't the sole reason, their server software generally sucked, e.g. a lot of people happily switched to Apache once it was perceived as being sufficiently trustworthy. I could see the latter happening in the 1995-6 period. One thing I've read about the rewrite is that Netscape accuihired? (back before that was a word) a failed company, and put its failed managers in charge, who I guess were good at what r…

Its funny (and ironic to me given the topic) you mention Netscape and Apache. One of my first jobs out of college was rewriting an old LiveWire application (yes ... the original server side Javascript) to a JSP Tomcat application.

I forgot LiveWire existed. One of few that finally faded from memory. Of old & commercial ones, AOL server + a TCL web framework are still getting updated. Opera is getting redone. The product with the coolest name is still scraping by per .cfm pages I see. Some ancient tech still around but mostly going bye bye.

Only thing left is maybe to redo Mosaic in Ruby or Java to see if it's technically feasible to slow its rendering down any further.

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

#355

Post by mwcampbell »

Kunix wrote: post #140
creshal wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Components/ES6/CSS3 features. - You can rely on native Node.js modules when needed. So, developer convenience trumps user experience? Who cares about your battery run time, how hot your PC runs, the bandwidth overhead, the massive attack surface from all the useless components shipped, how badly the webapp integrates into your OS,…

As a user, my experience with HTML/CSS/JS apps is great. Look at the excellent feedback the Atom Editor is getting. As a developer, I feel that it's easier for me to create good user experience (nice UI, easy non-blocking I/Os by default, etc). I don't say it's flawless, I say it's now becoming a very good alternative.

> As a user, my experience with HTML/CSS/JS apps is great. Look at the excellent feedback the Atom Editor is getting.

For some less positive feedback on Atom, which reinforces some of creshal's points, see the Atom section of this text editor rundown:

http://eev.ee/blog/2015/05/31/text-editor-rundown/

I've also frequently seen complaints to the effect that Atom is much too slow, even on machines only a few years old. Even my 486 laptop back in 1997 could run a text editor with syntax highlighting (specifically, JPad for programming in Java). What are editors doing these days that needs so much CPU power?

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

#356

Post by stuxnet79 »

gosukiwi wrote: post #336
jcurbo wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird user for years here. I now use Postbox, which is (I believe) a commercial fork of Thunderbird. https://www.postbox-inc.com/

"4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)" Wow why does it need so much RAM.

Interesting story tangentially related to this question. I just finished building my new gaming rig - the only thing left is a GPU which should be coming in the mail pretty soon. The CPU I have, a core i7 4790K, has a pretty decent GPU so I was testing it out the last couple of days. The first game I tried was GTA 5. It ran smoothly (albeit at the lowest possible settings and 720p resolution). I was pretty impressed with the integrated graphics' performance. Yesterday I tried GTAV out again for a little bit and I observed that it was ... way too choppy and basically unplayable. I couldn't figure out the reason why. Then I saw that Thunderbird was the only application that was open aside from Steam and GTAV. I closed it down again and boom, back to consistently high framerates.

What is the catch here? Granted I'm using the integrated graphics that came with the CPU but I have 32 GBs of RAM. What gives!??

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

#357

Post by bad_user »

johnsonjo wrote: post #345
ultramancool wrote: post #195

I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to h…

I saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1

It may be open source, but it's a thin client-side with your data being handled by the servers of a third party. No thanks, as trusting Google or FastMail with my email is a tough pill to swallow already, trusting an intermediary as well is way too much.

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

#358

Post by ultramancool »

johnsonjo wrote: post #345
ultramancool wrote: post #195

I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to h…

I saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1

Nylas N1 requires a custom server (Nylas Sync Engine) to do notifications. Why? Their FAQ is extremely vague about it. Apparently it suffers the same performance issues as plain IMAP for search. It seems this might be to support their Electron based UI, which seems... bloated to say the least.

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

#359

Post by X-Istence »

rplnt wrote: post #105
lsh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Qt5 ships with WebKit.

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

#360

Post by sebie »

Animats wrote: post #330
cpeterso wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird usage continues to grow, almost reaching 10M users: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...

Is that more than Firefox OS?

Yes, I think so. There might be a mention of it in the article.
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