16 ms·

Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird. I am increasingly baffled b

Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird. I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me. That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mozilla/Firefox than a surprise integration of a commercial app. [0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020 https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020

Manishearth 10y ago
I could be wrong here, but the thunderbird thing is basically that it was way too much work for little gain -- the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. I'm also not sure of this, but that vision thing you link to is focused on the goals of the Foundation proper (excluding MoCo), which is not all of Mozilla, and many of the decisions fall out of that scope.
- M_- 10y ago
  > the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. No. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Creating_a_Wizard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu... All written in their XML. It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions. The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which.. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API. Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor ( https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=e... ) and many others. Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway.
  - mwcampbell 10y ago
    XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. But people generally aren't interested in those anymore. At least HTML and the rest of the web stack work OK on mobile platforms.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      What definition of heavy are you using here? Because despite often being 'thin clients', most of the programs I run that embed HTML engines for the UI end up being stupendously resource-intensive compared to their native equivalents.
      - kibwen 10y ago
        I think that your parent commentator is noting that people pretty much just stopped writing desktop apps altogether, at least relative to webapps. In my childhood I downloaded desktop apps left and right for everything, but nowadays I only download apps in two categories: developer tools and Steam games. E.g. something like http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ would have invariably been a desktop app only a few years ago.
    - mbel 10y ago
      > XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(
      - kibwen 10y ago
        Thunderbird didn't lose to an Electron-based app, it lost to Gmail.
        j3097736 10y ago
        Because Google usually does a pretty good job as far as performance is concerned. ie: They have a simple 404 page instead of some novelty page with funny text and a random webm playing in the background
- rhelmer 10y ago
  Aside from technical issues, native mail clients are shrinking in use over time, not growing. It does not seem like the right place to invest to continue having relevance in the marketplace.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Mozilla doesn't have to worry about the marketplace.
    - rhelmer 10y ago
      I disagree. Mozilla doesn't have a table at standards bodies or any sort of lever to make positive change on the internet without a healthy marketshare for its products.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    > native mail clients are shrinking in use over time, not growing. I see that with my colleagues, who have Gmail (Gapps for domains) in one tab and OWA in another... instead of using a mail client with unified mailbox and not having tp look after which account has the message. Yes, Apple Mail.app user here, who is not going to switch to webapp mail anytime soon.
zobzu 10y ago
Thunderbird doesn't make money. Pocket makes money. That Mozilla is a Corp owned by a not-for-profit isn't the real thing anymore (ie not what people may believe, not that they have any obligation beside following the rule of law) - it just frees the Corp from having to report to random share holders - instead, the Corp and the Org self-select a Board of directors that they report to. At the end of the day, it's otherwise now similar to many corporations.
- omouse 10y ago
  You can see that just by looking at their job postings. The experimental ads team was hiring and then stopped and then the team was absorbed into other teams. Now they have more postings for project managers. They're basically introducing more hierarchy and traditional corp. stuff from the sounds of it.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    Having more project managers is how things get done. I see it everyday at my company...
    - shock 10y ago
      I can't tell if you're for real or just being sarcastic.
      - charlesdm 10y ago
        Clearly sarcasm.
      - zobzu 10y ago
        you might have not had more than one manager then :)
      - maxxxxx 10y ago
        More meetings help too :)
      - 10y ago
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
To be fair Thunderbird is awful. Every single time I try to find a better client I see someone suggesting "oh Thunderbird has gotten way better; give it a shot! I love it!" and every time I fall for it and it's the same slow, horrible application that I've tried again and again. I'm all for them killing it.
- hubert123 10y ago
  I was recently looking for desktop email clients and there is literally not a single free alternative? Cant be that awful if it's the only one.
  - fgonzag 10y ago
    I use opera mail client. It's quite decent. I switched from thunderbird.
    - fghafoor 10y ago
      Ddbdh
  - fghafoor 10y ago
    Mailbird is pretty awesome. Been using for a year now. If you like thunderbird theres postbox developed from thunderbird
- dboreham 10y ago
  Slow? Hmm...are you sure it isn't your server that's slow?
  - richardwhiuk 10y ago
    The speed of a desktop UI client shouldn't be related to how quick the server is.
    - wott 10y ago
jimporter 10y ago
(Context: I'm a submodule owner on Thunderbird, but haven't had much time to work on it lately. It should go without saying, but the comments below are my own view on the matter and shouldn't be considered authoritative.) tl;dr: I think Mozilla has actually treated Thunderbird fairly well (but not quite as well as I'd like). Thunderbird has been difficult for Mozilla to support for a while. In many ways, Thunderbird is only in as good a spot as it is because of people at Mozilla who still care about Thunderbird. There are lots of Gecko features that are used by Firefox and Thunderbird, and often, Gecko devs who make breaking changes to something Thunderbird uses will - if not fix the bug - at least alert the Thunderbird team of the breakage and point them in the right direction to fix it. They're also willing to support (some) stuff that only benefits Thunderbird, especially in the text editor. This can be hard for both teams though, like when Mozilla made huge changes to the Firefox build system; since Thunderbird imports the entire Firefox source tree, Thunderbird had to keep up or be unable to build. As you can imagine, these difficulties will only be magnified by the (slow) move away from XUL. Worse, Thunderbird's codebase is pretty crufty and full of decisions that last seemed good over a decade ago (e.g. libmime's decision to create its own C-based object system instead of using C++ like the rest of Gecko[1]). It would take a lot of work to make the codebase not suck, and I'm not sure Thunderbird has ever had enough paid staff to do that in a reasonable timeframe. These architectural issues are the reason that message tabs in Thunderbird aren't actually multiplexed: every time you open a message tab, it actually just rearranges the elements from the single instance of the 3-pane layout to make it look right. (That's why scroll position in message tabs isn't preserved when you switch tabs.) Thunderbird has also has significant difficulties finding a way to make money. Those who remember the Mozilla Messaging days (and the subsequent merge back into MoCo) might recall how that's when the team pushed for features like "Get a New Mail Account" (which has partnered mail providers who could sell users a fancy email address), "FileLink" (which has partners providing file hosting), and even a planned effort to do like Firefox and make money from search referrals (this fell through for some fairly strange partnership issues that I'm not sure I can talk about). However, despite their general desire to discontinue financial support for Thunderbird, Mozilla (the Foundation, I believe) has opened up donations specifically for Thunderbird[2] which, as I understand it, gave the Thunderbird Council the ability to hire the first paid engineer on Thunderbird in several years[3]. In addition, Mozilla has worked to help Thunderbird find a new long-term home and has provided infrastructure support when they really don't need to do either. While I think Mozilla should place a greater focus on email, I'm not sure Thunderbird is the best way to go about that, especially as Mozilla moves away from XUL. With the rise of Electron/Positron, something like glodastrophe[4] (based on the ill-fated Firefox OS email app) might have a better long-term outlook. However, trying to replicate all (or even most) of Thunderbird's features in a new application would be a huge effort and it's unclear whether the app would be popular enough to make all that effort worthwhile; I expect Mozilla would want to feel confident that they could use such an app to influence email/messaging standards. I don't know what's going to happen in the long run, but as a Mozilla employee who started out working on Thunderbird, I still have a special place in my heart for it. I hope that one day Mozilla will be willing to revisit email, but it might take a while. [1] https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/src/mimei.h#90-93 https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/sr... [2] https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ [3] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2016-December/005142.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2016-December... [4] https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe
notatoad 10y ago
The people that complain about mozilla stopping development on thunderbird seem to be the same people that complain about things like firefox moving to WebExtensions, and Firefox changing their UI, and Firefox integrating Pocket. I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change. There is an email client that you like, as is, and want to keep using, and you're annoyed because mozilla has promised not to change it?
- strictnein 10y ago
  Does the lack of changes include no security updates? Then yes, one should be annoyed and Thunderbird usage should be discontinued.
  - notatoad 10y ago
    No, security updates are still being made. Here's the release notes for recent security fixes in thunderbird: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/thunderbird/#thunderbird45.7 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
    - shock 10y ago
      Are the security updates done by Mozilla itself or by the volunteers that continue Thunderbird development?
      - chii 10y ago
        why do you care where the patches come from?
        kobayashi 10y ago
        One might care where the patches come from as a volunteer community could be less reliable over time than the paid Mozilla staff. I know I certainly feel that way.
bad_user 10y ago
Thunderbird is still under active development, I'm one of their users, being the best email client for the desktop. Unfortunately Thunderbird is also a dead end, being incompatible with Firefox's direction. Yes, XUL is dead and Firefox is evolving into a Chrome substitute and while people have serious concerns about it, fact of the matter is that Chrome was designed for web apps and almost 9 years after its release Chrome is still the best browser available for web apps. Not sure how many people here remember Chrome's original goals, beautifully illustrated by their comic book announcement, but here's a refresher and try to count the problems that Firefox still has in 2017: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html In other words, Firefox is dying because users have been trained to expect security, stability, an interface free of crappy toolbars and extensions you can't uninstall, not to mention running long lived web apps. And while people on this forum will cry out for Vimperator or other poweruser extensions that 99.9% of the world have never heard about, it's undeniable that without evasive action Firefox will become a footnote in only a couple of years. I'm also a Firefox user and I understand their move away from Thunderbird. For work I use Gmail, personal email is Fastmail, both have really good web interfaces. And while I try using email clients like Thunderbird, the web interfaces are simply good enough and always there. These are web apps btw and guess which browser is best for web apps? It's not Firefox ;-) And for all I care Mozilla can kill every project they have, if that means Firefox continues to improve. Because it's still the only browser that cares about my freedoms.
- jeena 10y ago
  But gmail and fastmail don't work offline.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    The only time I find myself offline is when I'm flying. Not that big of a deal.
    - Accacin 10y ago
      So you don't need or require backups of your emails offline?
FatalBaboon 10y ago
I cannot understand the need for a thing like Pocket. Much less why Mozilla prefers to keep it close, and even less for money. I mean, what is wrong with bookmarks and sharing links? Firefox can even send tabs to other computers I got linked via ff sync. Iterate on a bad idea, give it a social spin, and voilà! You have a sellable startup. Except you should not buy that.
- moberemk 10y ago
  Two big things: 1) it's a lot faster to send to Pocket with the button > mark as read than managing bookmarks IMO but the real killer feature for me is 2) the offline saving of articles. Pocket is killer when I'm commuting or without Wi-Fi because it means I can keep reading things without worrying about finding a hotspot or wasting my (very limited) data.
  - carussell 10y ago
    > Pocket is killer when I'm commuting or without Wi-Fi ... and yet this thread and every other Mozilla apologist thread is always filled with folks who suggest that it's no big deal to assume an always-on, always-available network connection.
    - trome 10y ago
      Yeah, the problem with all these web apps is the lack of functionality when offline. Most just don't work, and some have a half working offline mode, but non-perfect connectivity or no connectivity really limits productivity today.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Bookmarks-management sucks. Pocket provides multi-platform access. And multi-browser access -- doesn't matter if I'm on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, whatevs, I can pull up Pocket. Pocket strips all of today's utterly fucked, utterly useless, utterly counterproductive Web design. I cannot emphasize too much: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. Offline reading. Pocket articles (via app) can be read when disconnected. Tags. You can create, and cross-reference, tags between articles. Scale. I've got ~3k - 4k articles on Pocket. Possibly more. (I'll get to that.) They're related to ongoing research, and the ability to find, classify, and relocate large amounts of material is useful. Whilst Pocket doesn't have a ratings or workflow-related management, I've somewhat created these. A set of tags that relates to quality (rated 0 - 5, low to high, where 0 indicates negative information, 5 indicates a foundational document -- most content is a 2 or 3, and that's rating high. Books and scientific papers generally earn a '4': definitive or clarifying, though generally not foundational. For workflow, I'm largely working with "readme" (a reminder to go back and read closely), and a set of tags related to specific writing projects. I need to come up with a more useful system. Pocket also ... sort of and/or sometimes ... allows for full-text search within documents. This may have been a promotional-only feature. Given that the Web as a whole is approaching uselessness under scope of search, the ability to look through a set of documents I've already at least partially vetted is tremendously useful. There's a whole slew of things Pocket doesn't do, which I'll address in a top-level comment. I've shared these with the firm, though I've seen little or no progress on any of them in ages.
sametmax 10y ago
They try to stay independent. They try to manage their resources. So they can still exist to be Mozilla in the future. It's HARD. Don't blame them from not being the perfect champion we used to idealize. They are doing everything they can.
cgag 10y ago
I was pretty shocked when I learned they had more than 1000 employees.
aarontyree 10y ago
Ive thought the same thing. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if they...how do you say this nicely...I wonder if they are holding on to what they were? In their approach I mean. Like they think they are still fighting with Google? So they make decisions trying to get back to that "leader position" rather than really focusing on who and what they are...which is an awesome, creative, international open-source community with great ideas...that can out maneuver any large corporation because they are smaller and faster. And cooler. Then again, maybe this rebranding is evidence of exactly that realization.
frik 10y ago
It would be great to have a new modern open source email app on iOS, Android and desktop OS. I want a GMail app clone (conversation view), but open source (= doesn't phone home to the creator) that works with IMAP. Vivaldi browser (unofficial Opera successor) is working on an HTML5 powered email app, though will it be open source? On Android there is open source K9Mail app but it's pretty old fashion, no conversation view. I envision a new lean Mozilla browser (like Firefox was to Mozilla Suite back then) based on Rust powered Servo-HTML-engine and a HTML based UI. Additionally an email app addon would fit in my vision.
0xTJ 10y ago
If Thunderbird is going to stop being developed, what should I use instead? I like having the add-ons, and use the Calendar with Office 365 Enterprise stuff, and Google Calendar.

Manishearth 10y ago

I could be wrong here, but the thunderbird thing is basically that it was way too much work for little gain -- the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. I'm also not sure of this, but that vision thing you link to is focused on the goals of the Foundation proper (excluding MoCo), which is not all of Mozilla, and many of the decisions fall out of that scope.

M_- 10y ago
> the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. No. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Creating_a_Wizard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu... All written in their XML. It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions. The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which.. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API. Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor ( https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=e... ) and many others. Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway.
- mwcampbell 10y ago
  XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. But people generally aren't interested in those anymore. At least HTML and the rest of the web stack work OK on mobile platforms.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    What definition of heavy are you using here? Because despite often being 'thin clients', most of the programs I run that embed HTML engines for the UI end up being stupendously resource-intensive compared to their native equivalents.
    - kibwen 10y ago
      I think that your parent commentator is noting that people pretty much just stopped writing desktop apps altogether, at least relative to webapps. In my childhood I downloaded desktop apps left and right for everything, but nowadays I only download apps in two categories: developer tools and Steam games. E.g. something like http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ would have invariably been a desktop app only a few years ago.
  - mbel 10y ago
    > XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(
    - kibwen 10y ago
      Thunderbird didn't lose to an Electron-based app, it lost to Gmail.
      - j3097736 10y ago
        Because Google usually does a pretty good job as far as performance is concerned. ie: They have a simple 404 page instead of some novelty page with funny text and a random webm playing in the background
rhelmer 10y ago
Aside from technical issues, native mail clients are shrinking in use over time, not growing. It does not seem like the right place to invest to continue having relevance in the marketplace.
- flukus 10y ago
  Mozilla doesn't have to worry about the marketplace.
  - rhelmer 10y ago
    I disagree. Mozilla doesn't have a table at standards bodies or any sort of lever to make positive change on the internet without a healthy marketshare for its products.
- vetinari 10y ago
  > native mail clients are shrinking in use over time, not growing. I see that with my colleagues, who have Gmail (Gapps for domains) in one tab and OWA in another... instead of using a mail client with unified mailbox and not having tp look after which account has the message. Yes, Apple Mail.app user here, who is not going to switch to webapp mail anytime soon.

zobzu 10y ago

Thunderbird doesn't make money. Pocket makes money. That Mozilla is a Corp owned by a not-for-profit isn't the real thing anymore (ie not what people may believe, not that they have any obligation beside following the rule of law) - it just frees the Corp from having to report to random share holders - instead, the Corp and the Org self-select a Board of directors that they report to. At the end of the day, it's otherwise now similar to many corporations.

omouse 10y ago
You can see that just by looking at their job postings. The experimental ads team was hiring and then stopped and then the team was absorbed into other teams. Now they have more postings for project managers. They're basically introducing more hierarchy and traditional corp. stuff from the sounds of it.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Having more project managers is how things get done. I see it everyday at my company...
  - shock 10y ago
    I can't tell if you're for real or just being sarcastic.
    - charlesdm 10y ago
      Clearly sarcasm.
    - zobzu 10y ago
      you might have not had more than one manager then :)
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      More meetings help too :)
    - 10y ago

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

To be fair Thunderbird is awful. Every single time I try to find a better client I see someone suggesting "oh Thunderbird has gotten way better; give it a shot! I love it!" and every time I fall for it and it's the same slow, horrible application that I've tried again and again. I'm all for them killing it.

hubert123 10y ago
I was recently looking for desktop email clients and there is literally not a single free alternative? Cant be that awful if it's the only one.
- fgonzag 10y ago
  I use opera mail client. It's quite decent. I switched from thunderbird.
  - fghafoor 10y ago
    Ddbdh
- fghafoor 10y ago
  Mailbird is pretty awesome. Been using for a year now. If you like thunderbird theres postbox developed from thunderbird
dboreham 10y ago
Slow? Hmm...are you sure it isn't your server that's slow?
- richardwhiuk 10y ago
  The speed of a desktop UI client shouldn't be related to how quick the server is.
  - wott 10y ago

jimporter 10y ago

(Context: I'm a submodule owner on Thunderbird, but haven't had much time to work on it lately. It should go without saying, but the comments below are my own view on the matter and shouldn't be considered authoritative.) tl;dr: I think Mozilla has actually treated Thunderbird fairly well (but not quite as well as I'd like). Thunderbird has been difficult for Mozilla to support for a while. In many ways, Thunderbird is only in as good a spot as it is because of people at Mozilla who still care about Thunderbird. There are lots of Gecko features that are used by Firefox and Thunderbird, and often, Gecko devs who make breaking changes to something Thunderbird uses will - if not fix the bug - at least alert the Thunderbird team of the breakage and point them in the right direction to fix it. They're also willing to support (some) stuff that only benefits Thunderbird, especially in the text editor. This can be hard for both teams though, like when Mozilla made huge changes to the Firefox build system; since Thunderbird imports the entire Firefox source tree, Thunderbird had to keep up or be unable to build. As you can imagine, these difficulties will only be magnified by the (slow) move away from XUL. Worse, Thunderbird's codebase is pretty crufty and full of decisions that last seemed good over a decade ago (e.g. libmime's decision to create its own C-based object system instead of using C++ like the rest of Gecko[1]). It would take a lot of work to make the codebase not suck, and I'm not sure Thunderbird has ever had enough paid staff to do that in a reasonable timeframe. These architectural issues are the reason that message tabs in Thunderbird aren't actually multiplexed: every time you open a message tab, it actually just rearranges the elements from the single instance of the 3-pane layout to make it look right. (That's why scroll position in message tabs isn't preserved when you switch tabs.) Thunderbird has also has significant difficulties finding a way to make money. Those who remember the Mozilla Messaging days (and the subsequent merge back into MoCo) might recall how that's when the team pushed for features like "Get a New Mail Account" (which has partnered mail providers who could sell users a fancy email address), "FileLink" (which has partners providing file hosting), and even a planned effort to do like Firefox and make money from search referrals (this fell through for some fairly strange partnership issues that I'm not sure I can talk about). However, despite their general desire to discontinue financial support for Thunderbird, Mozilla (the Foundation, I believe) has opened up donations specifically for Thunderbird[2] which, as I understand it, gave the Thunderbird Council the ability to hire the first paid engineer on Thunderbird in several years[3]. In addition, Mozilla has worked to help Thunderbird find a new long-term home and has provided infrastructure support when they really don't need to do either. While I think Mozilla should place a greater focus on email, I'm not sure Thunderbird is the best way to go about that, especially as Mozilla moves away from XUL. With the rise of Electron/Positron, something like glodastrophe[4] (based on the ill-fated Firefox OS email app) might have a better long-term outlook. However, trying to replicate all (or even most) of Thunderbird's features in a new application would be a huge effort and it's unclear whether the app would be popular enough to make all that effort worthwhile; I expect Mozilla would want to feel confident that they could use such an app to influence email/messaging standards. I don't know what's going to happen in the long run, but as a Mozilla employee who started out working on Thunderbird, I still have a special place in my heart for it. I hope that one day Mozilla will be willing to revisit email, but it might take a while. [1] https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/src/mimei.h#90-93 https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/sr... [2] https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ [3] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2016-December/005142.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2016-December... [4] https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe

notatoad 10y ago

The people that complain about mozilla stopping development on thunderbird seem to be the same people that complain about things like firefox moving to WebExtensions, and Firefox changing their UI, and Firefox integrating Pocket. I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change. There is an email client that you like, as is, and want to keep using, and you're annoyed because mozilla has promised not to change it?

strictnein 10y ago
Does the lack of changes include no security updates? Then yes, one should be annoyed and Thunderbird usage should be discontinued.
- notatoad 10y ago
  No, security updates are still being made. Here's the release notes for recent security fixes in thunderbird: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/thunderbird/#thunderbird45.7 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
  - shock 10y ago
    Are the security updates done by Mozilla itself or by the volunteers that continue Thunderbird development?
    - chii 10y ago
      why do you care where the patches come from?
      - kobayashi 10y ago
        One might care where the patches come from as a volunteer community could be less reliable over time than the paid Mozilla staff. I know I certainly feel that way.

bad_user 10y ago

Thunderbird is still under active development, I'm one of their users, being the best email client for the desktop. Unfortunately Thunderbird is also a dead end, being incompatible with Firefox's direction. Yes, XUL is dead and Firefox is evolving into a Chrome substitute and while people have serious concerns about it, fact of the matter is that Chrome was designed for web apps and almost 9 years after its release Chrome is still the best browser available for web apps. Not sure how many people here remember Chrome's original goals, beautifully illustrated by their comic book announcement, but here's a refresher and try to count the problems that Firefox still has in 2017: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html In other words, Firefox is dying because users have been trained to expect security, stability, an interface free of crappy toolbars and extensions you can't uninstall, not to mention running long lived web apps. And while people on this forum will cry out for Vimperator or other poweruser extensions that 99.9% of the world have never heard about, it's undeniable that without evasive action Firefox will become a footnote in only a couple of years. I'm also a Firefox user and I understand their move away from Thunderbird. For work I use Gmail, personal email is Fastmail, both have really good web interfaces. And while I try using email clients like Thunderbird, the web interfaces are simply good enough and always there. These are web apps btw and guess which browser is best for web apps? It's not Firefox ;-) And for all I care Mozilla can kill every project they have, if that means Firefox continues to improve. Because it's still the only browser that cares about my freedoms.

jeena 10y ago
But gmail and fastmail don't work offline.
- bad_user 10y ago
  The only time I find myself offline is when I'm flying. Not that big of a deal.
  - Accacin 10y ago
    So you don't need or require backups of your emails offline?

FatalBaboon 10y ago

I cannot understand the need for a thing like Pocket. Much less why Mozilla prefers to keep it close, and even less for money. I mean, what is wrong with bookmarks and sharing links? Firefox can even send tabs to other computers I got linked via ff sync. Iterate on a bad idea, give it a social spin, and voilà! You have a sellable startup. Except you should not buy that.

moberemk 10y ago
Two big things: 1) it's a lot faster to send to Pocket with the button > mark as read than managing bookmarks IMO but the real killer feature for me is 2) the offline saving of articles. Pocket is killer when I'm commuting or without Wi-Fi because it means I can keep reading things without worrying about finding a hotspot or wasting my (very limited) data.
- carussell 10y ago
  > Pocket is killer when I'm commuting or without Wi-Fi ... and yet this thread and every other Mozilla apologist thread is always filled with folks who suggest that it's no big deal to assume an always-on, always-available network connection.
  - trome 10y ago
    Yeah, the problem with all these web apps is the lack of functionality when offline. Most just don't work, and some have a half working offline mode, but non-perfect connectivity or no connectivity really limits productivity today.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Bookmarks-management sucks. Pocket provides multi-platform access. And multi-browser access -- doesn't matter if I'm on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, whatevs, I can pull up Pocket. Pocket strips all of today's utterly fucked, utterly useless, utterly counterproductive Web design. I cannot emphasize too much: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. Offline reading. Pocket articles (via app) can be read when disconnected. Tags. You can create, and cross-reference, tags between articles. Scale. I've got ~3k - 4k articles on Pocket. Possibly more. (I'll get to that.) They're related to ongoing research, and the ability to find, classify, and relocate large amounts of material is useful. Whilst Pocket doesn't have a ratings or workflow-related management, I've somewhat created these. A set of tags that relates to quality (rated 0 - 5, low to high, where 0 indicates negative information, 5 indicates a foundational document -- most content is a 2 or 3, and that's rating high. Books and scientific papers generally earn a '4': definitive or clarifying, though generally not foundational. For workflow, I'm largely working with "readme" (a reminder to go back and read closely), and a set of tags related to specific writing projects. I need to come up with a more useful system. Pocket also ... sort of and/or sometimes ... allows for full-text search within documents. This may have been a promotional-only feature. Given that the Web as a whole is approaching uselessness under scope of search, the ability to look through a set of documents I've already at least partially vetted is tremendously useful. There's a whole slew of things Pocket doesn't do, which I'll address in a top-level comment. I've shared these with the firm, though I've seen little or no progress on any of them in ages.

sametmax 10y ago

They try to stay independent. They try to manage their resources. So they can still exist to be Mozilla in the future. It's HARD. Don't blame them from not being the perfect champion we used to idealize. They are doing everything they can.

cgag 10y ago

I was pretty shocked when I learned they had more than 1000 employees.

aarontyree 10y ago

Ive thought the same thing. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if they...how do you say this nicely...I wonder if they are holding on to what they were? In their approach I mean. Like they think they are still fighting with Google? So they make decisions trying to get back to that "leader position" rather than really focusing on who and what they are...which is an awesome, creative, international open-source community with great ideas...that can out maneuver any large corporation because they are smaller and faster. And cooler. Then again, maybe this rebranding is evidence of exactly that realization.

frik 10y ago

It would be great to have a new modern open source email app on iOS, Android and desktop OS. I want a GMail app clone (conversation view), but open source (= doesn't phone home to the creator) that works with IMAP. Vivaldi browser (unofficial Opera successor) is working on an HTML5 powered email app, though will it be open source? On Android there is open source K9Mail app but it's pretty old fashion, no conversation view. I envision a new lean Mozilla browser (like Firefox was to Mozilla Suite back then) based on Rust powered Servo-HTML-engine and a HTML based UI. Additionally an email app addon would fit in my vision.

0xTJ 10y ago

If Thunderbird is going to stop being developed, what should I use instead? I like having the add-ons, and use the Calendar with Office 365 Enterprise stuff, and Google Calendar.