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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

#381

Post by ZenoArrow »

scrollaway wrote: post #306
ZenoArrow wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying they don't." They already do. Electron, Web Components, etc... > "Do you even have evidence that it'll be better than what we have now in other languages if it does take over?" Compare the performance of vanilla JS vs. asm.js. It is clear from what developers have stated that WebAssembly performance will exceed the performance of asm.js, the threading improvements alone should…

> They already do. Electron, Web Components, etc... And nobody can agree on which to use. It's not standard if it's just "some set of components some people reuse". A far cry from standardization. > Compare the performance of vanilla JS vs. asm.js. That's not what I'm comparing. I'm comparing the performance of native toolkits vs web toolkits on asm.js. It pales in comparison, and the battery usage is through the roo…

> "And nobody can agree on which to use. It's not standard if it's just "some set of components some people reuse". A far cry from standardization."

Atom uses Electron, VS Code uses Electron, Light Table uses Electron (starting with v0.8).

As for the web side, web apps are a young field, what else would you expect?

There are certainly popular UI elements, Bootstrap for example.

If you want to make an web app that looks native, using React Native could be a good solution.

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

#382

Post by merb »

georgerobinson wrote: post #365
betteringred wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I really want to agree with you that Atom is awesome, and it is, in principle, but in reality a text editor should not be using 300MB of RAM. Sublime Text, which I consider to be a direct competitor, barely uses 20MB of memory on my machine even after hours of use. Heck, does Intellij even use that much memory? I'm just really discouraged with how more and more desktop apps are being written in HTML, CSS and Javascri…

IntelliJ has something between 100mb and 700mb depending how much projects you have open and what language you use.

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

#383

Post by david-given »

Karunamon wrote: post #244
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've moved to Mutt/OfflineIMAP on most every machine I own, and it's worked remarkably well. It's a CLI app, yes, but it outshines Thunderbird (and most other GUI clients, for that matter) in a number of ways: - FAST. Mutt lets you process thousands of messages in short order. Mutt is directly responsible for helping me dig out of a 50k deep email hole brought on by years of GMail's approach (archive, never delete) i…

Is there a version of Mutt with a GUI yet?

While I like command line apps, and am a die hard vim user, there are just some applications that I really want to use a mouse for, and email is one of them. I've tried mutt a few times before and it's just never clicked with me. It's not that I can't learn how to drive it --- it's that I don't want to have to. Finding little-used commands is so much easier if there's an actual menu.

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

#384

Post by masukomi »

ultramancool wrote: post #368
bad_user wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can actually host the Nylas Sync Engine yourself so if you're seriously considering it, it's still an option.

yes, but why not just use a client that doesn't need a server-side component

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

#385

Post by ZenoArrow »

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…

XUL wasn't a failed experiment. From what I understand it served as the inspiration for some of the new features found in HTML. If that's the case it was a useful experiment.

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

#386

Post by cm3 »

angry-hacker wrote: post #295
cm3 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using Vivaldi? It's awfully slow to respond to user interaction because it's all HTML. Say what you want about XUL, but for something aiming to be like HTML it never felt slow. If Vivaldi's non-existing responsiveness is what the new Firefox will be, then they should seriously consider to rewrite the whole thing like a game (in OpenGL/Vulkan) instead. Oh and XUL was optimized for memory efficiency, whi…

Vivaldi is much faster than Firefox on both Linux and Windows, where I'm using it. Of course it's still alpha software, but the UI is blazing fast compared to FF.

It's substantially slower than Chromium and Firefox for me on Linux. Both Chromium and Firefox are very fast in comparison on my machines. I'm glad it's faster for you, I really am.

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

#387

Post by e12e »

bigquestion wrote: post #126
toyg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way, yes. If you look at OS interfaces from the '80s and compare them with modern ones, you'll see a lot of cpu power is now spent on eye-candy but functionally they're not terribly different. Except they're all built on C++, whereas before they were in C or lower-level languages. OO was the HTML/CSS/JS of the '90s.

Could all the large software applications of today have been created without OOP, just on functional programming paradigms? If OOP was beneficial 10 years on, maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications.

The most remarkable part of "web apps" is probably what they do not improve on:

Smalltalk had (has) messaging and decent object orientation (and you have that especially in latest js) - but Smalltalk never had one standard vm implementation - different versions had different image (ram-saved-to-disk, source code and byte-code) and vms. Javascript has common source code, but no common vm/image format.

Office Suites had rich documents with smart(ish) widgets, but no security - a macro in Excel had access to all your spreadsheet data. Web apps don't really have any good encapsulation either -- so we'll likely repeat the macro-virus era with web virus era (I'm not sure if we already are or not, there's certainly been a few self-replicating ones, that eg spread via facebook updates etc. Not sure if they generally live in the phone-apps or various web-apps. Probably both).

We already had the future of web applications within reach years ago - but apparently no-one cared: http://lively-kernel.org/

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

#388

Post by ZenoArrow »

pcwalton wrote: post #338
nickpsecurity wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice my references to Web 1.0, 2.0, etc? That means my comment was talking about not just the browsers but the sites designed for them. The combination of the two have made web sites really slow that could be designed to load up instantly. Instead, they load up as slowly as some sites did on my old Pentium 2 running Opera, etc. You'd think they'd be significantly faster with all the Moore's law iterations and brows…

Opera and IE were no different in architecture.

What are you referring to? Opera and IE certainly used different rendering engines: Trident for IE, Presto for Opera (before it moved to Blink).

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

#389

Post by tjohns »

masukomi wrote: post #384
ultramancool wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually host the Nylas Sync Engine yourself so if you're seriously considering it, it's still an option.

yes, but why not just use a client that doesn't need a server-side component

Looking through their API docs, one of the things that I noticed is that they added a transaction log ("delta" field), which IMAP doesn't have: https://www.nylas.com/docs/#deltas

Having a server communicate with IMAP (which is slow), cache the results, and export a more efficient/log-structured alternative probably makes syncing client computers much faster.

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

#390

Post by ZenoArrow »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #349
pcwalton wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera and IE were no different in architecture.

Wasnt aware of that. Interesting. It was just faster, better looking, and skinnable. Plus malware stayed hitting IE so there was that too.

I don't think the statement you replied to is correct.
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