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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

#71

Post by yAnonymous »

jonathonf wrote: post #44
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 (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. They could still be doing it wrong.

The developer community is a good benchmark. When you do it wrong, people usually don't use your software.

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

#72

Post by sonnyp »

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…

Don't forget servo. Even if it's not official yet, Servo is the way to go for Firefox. Implementing XUL in servo would be a huge mistake.

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

#74

Post by nashashmi »

bad_user wrote: post #5

Thunderbird is still being actively developed by the community. I'm on version 42 beta and it's looking good. This is what open source is about. It doesn't matter if the parent no longer wants to maintain it. As long as there is interest, the product survives.

Reaching number 42 is not a sign of stopped development. I checked out TB once again. And it looks a lot nicer. I was surprised to see updates for windows 10 too!

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

#75

Post by meshko »

puppetmaster3 wrote: post #58
bad_user wrote: post #5

Thunderbird is still being actively developed by the community. I'm on version 42 beta and it's looking good. This is what open source is about. It doesn't matter if the parent no longer wants to maintain it. As long as there is interest, the product survives.

Remember when Adobe abandoned Flash? Apache: http://flex.apache.org

Flex is not Flash and Apache Flex distribution is not exactly a poster child of abandoneware surviving as an OSS project. Apache Flex releases are infrequent, not bug free and generally smell of death.

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

#76

Post by vdaniuk »

I've never been completely satisfied with Thunderbird and have tried to switch multiple times, reverting to web clients every time. Now I am using Nylas N1 built on electron(imagine that!) and it looks very promising.

Also, arrogance of tech conservatives in every Mozilla or web tech thread on HN is becoming unbearable.

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

#77

Post by icebraining »

voaie wrote: post #60
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…

It is sad to see Web GUIs taking over the native GUIs. Everyone run their apps in a virtual GUI inside another GUI. That's meta-meta-crazy.

There's nothing native about XUL, though.

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

#78

Post by lsh »

Natanael_L wrote: post #30
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 ad…

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/

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

#79

Post by toyg »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #33
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" 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 than a very expensive pixel pipe. But that's what people like, because C++ is hard, native widgets are hard to customise, and everyone loves designing interfaces, so that's where we're going.

I anyone ever starts making javascript-optimised CPUs and GPUs, they're going to make billions. At the moment we only have micropython, but who knows...

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

#80

Post by andresmanz »

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.

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 the most disastrous code in the whole universe.

Look at Code Academy, for example. They add new programming languages and technologies every now and then, but basically it's always the same. Just like their audience. They won't add C to that list, because that wouldn't work for this average not-nerdy-enough-for-real-programming audience.

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