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

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

#91

Post by Kunix » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:24 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.

I am 29, started coding at 14, I've built UIs based on mIRC Scripting, VB/Winforms, C++/Qt, C#/WPF, Java/Android layouts. Using IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Qt Creator and Android Studio.

I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that:

- 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.

It's good for portability, HTML/CSS became better at UI, JS becomes a better language, current IDEs are great, live debugging tools are great.

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

#92

Post by kriro » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

What are viable alternatives (FLOSS+Mail+Calender+GUI)? I've used Evolution before and it was pretty good, I guess I'm switching back to that (more importantly I will have to switch my parents' computers as well, they have happily migrated to Linux). Claws also seems good at first glance. Have heard KMail and Trojita mentioned before but I'm not sure how much overhead having Qt for them would be (so basically ceteris paribus I'd rather have something GTK as Xubuntu is my distro of choice).

I guess Exchange integration would be needed eventually but I could work around that if need be. Linux and OS X support preferred, could live with Linux only.

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

#93

Post by danellis » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #49

jonathonf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Dude, you're likely typing on the "wrong" keyboard layout and use a "wrong" calendar... convention trumps correctness pretty much all the time. What matters is that enough people are doing it to make it "the way". I fully expect that we will eventually see a Javascript OS, because "it's so much easier to maintain".

We won't, because you can't write an OS in JavaScript; you need native code. Maybe a desktop environment or something, but not an OS.

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

#94

Post by dspillett » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:25 PM UTC

Your link redirects people to a "no hotlinking" image when used directly. For those affected: if you find the page in Google by searching for "The CADT Model" it does let you see the content via that route.

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

#95

Post by danellis » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:26 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…

> I anyone ever starts making javascript-optimised CPUs and GPUs, they're going to make billions.

They said the same about Java in the 90s. Java accelerated CPUs never really took off.

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

#96

Post by SyneRyder » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:26 PM UTC

toisanji wrote: post #12

I hope that Thunderbird continues to grow. What do you guys think of the closed source product http://postbox-inc.com built on top of Thunderbird?

I love Postbox. It's been my primary email client ever since I was forced to switch from Eudora. It even supports Thunderbird plugins with some small tweaks (mostly just recognising the Postbox User Agent).

My biggest complaint about Postbox is that it's too cheap. It's only $15... I paid more than that for my Twitter client. Email is mission critical for me, so I'm happy to pay at least $50 (maybe $50/year?) for whatever is the most efficient, powerful & reliable email client. I want to pay that money to a company so they'll keep developing & advancing the program, not abandon it like Mozilla is doing now.

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

#97

Post by hannob » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:26 PM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #45

crististm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been brainwashed about the "community" stuff. Mozilla _is_ a corporation. Linux is built by a corporation. Last time I checked, less than 18% of Linux patches were from independent contributors. Everything big enough to be known by Joe average hobbyist is built by a corporation. Let's see the community in action taking the lead when Mozilla drops the ball.

What features are you missing from Thunderbird?

Usable encryption.

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

#98

Post by danellis » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:28 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #94

Your link redirects people to a "no hotlinking" image when used directly. For those affected: if you find the page in Google by searching for "The CADT Model" it does let you see the content via that route.

What is the point of that?

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

#99

Post by toyg » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:29 PM UTC

bigquestion wrote: post #89

pmelendez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good thing (I think) of a generalist is that one is used to adapt, but yeah... it gets boring sometime. Although after a while, is interesting to see how we reinvent wheels and show them with a new fancy name, it is a pattern that you would see more or less each 10 years. Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's.

So this generation is rewriting everything that was made and working in the 90s. Was everything written in the 90s also a rehash of stuff from the 70s/80s? Just curious, what was the equivalent of HTML/CSS/JS in the 80s?

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.

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

#100

Post by micampe » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:31 PM UTC

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's all open source right? You are not the first person I see complaining about losing XUL, why is no one forking it instead of just making sarcastic comments? I thought that was the whole point of open source, that when the original maintainer loses interest the community takes over. You even say in another comment that the effort is not very big (I don't know, never seen the code) so why not?