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New Mozilla-based Mail Client: Minotaur
Ant writes "Minotaur is a redesign of the Mozilla mail component. Our goal is to produce a cross platform stand alone mail application using the XUL user interface language. We are modeling ourselves after the Phoenix rewrite of the Mozilla browser. Our intended customer is someone who uses Phoenix (or another non mozilla.exe browser) as their primary browser and wants a mail client based on mozilla that "plays nice" with their browser. Currently, mozilla -mail is not a good option for these users because link clicks and attachments end up going to mozilla browser windows instead of the preferred browser. In addition, by focusing solely on stand alone mail, we believe we can make some dents in the overall footprint and performance of the mail client by removing components and chrome we don't need."
I want to be able to put my mail on a shared FAT32 drive, and have access to my email seamlessly whether I boot up in Windows or Linux
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
You know what pisses me off... Netscape/Mozilla has been around all this time now, and you STILL can't tell it to lauch an app other than Netscape Mail when you click on an e-mail link! Not just e-mail, but page editing, and the address book as well. That has been my main gripe with Netscape (besides the ever present performance and stability problems) for years.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Feature request I suppose.
Allow for an IMAP/POP3 proxy to allow access to webmail accounts from inside a firewall without using ssh tunneling stuff.
we believe we can make some dents in the overall footprint and performance of the mail client by removing components and chrome we don't need
We don't need? Is it the developer who decide what the end-users needs are?
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Phoenix uses the Gecko render core for browsing whilst largely trying to ignore the XUL chrome, Minotaur going for a standalone mail client (but which will still use the Gecko core for rendering fancy mail), and so on.
Each to their own, I know I like Mozilla (browser only). Haven't tried Phoenix yet, but until the GRE is in place, and widely used, I probably won't be trying out Phoenix yet. Leaving Mozilla open 24/7 means I don't have any real performance hits.
Just my $0.02.
I can't believe they didn't mention the feature that I find most important: separation of the mail and browser in to separate processes. This improves stability and reliability. I don't want some misbehaving browser plugin causing a browser crash that also brings down the email client and message I've been editing for the last 30 minutes. I see process separation is on the Mozilla team's TODO list, but I suspect this will achieve that goal *long* before they do.
A mail client is one thing I never find myself wanting for on any platform. Even if you don't like Mozilla's bundled client (I don't), Windows users have The Bat!, Eudora, and Mulberry. I even heard Microsoft makes a mail client or two. Mac users have Eudora and Mulberry plus Mail.app and another Microsoft client. UNIX/Linux users get the always-fabulous mutt as well as Evolution and KMail. Oh, and Mulberry :D. It seems somewhere in that mess you could find one or two that meet your needs. I know I did, one for each platform. And I'm really picky about my e-mail...
:).
That said, I did just switch to Phoenix from Mozilla because I like its interface slightly better. It may load a little faster too, but with my main client machines all being 1.1ghz or better and the same browser instance being open most of the day I don't really notice.
I don't use Mozilla's mail client, so I suppose there could be features missing or a stand-aloneness that some people want. In that case, go for it.
I just hope this doesn't take someone's time who would be working on GNOME, KDE, OO.org, or a decent replacement for Macromedia Freehand/Adobe Illustrator
Game... blouses.
What the fuck is wrong with these people? Why can't these developers just work on the fucking project and improve it and make it better without having to rewrite into yet another application?
I had the exact same feeling when I saw the Phoenix announcement: WHY?!
I used to work for Netscape and I know what I am talking about. Mozilla was designed as a modular app. That's what XPCOM in there is for. So the right thing to do when you start bloating is refactor: take a big component, break it into nice modules and then let the USER decide which modules to install on his machine.
This way, it's like the user composes the app out of modules, so he can install there a Mozilla, a Phoenix or a Minotaur.
I use Mozilla Mail and I know COUNTLESS bugs and problems that need to be fixed and addressed. The only reason they are not is that there are not enough engineers to do that work.
So why is engineering effort spent on these spin-offs instead of spending it on the mail product and providing the needed requirements THERE?
Hey Minotaur Team, why? Hey Scott McGregor, is the ego trip more important than your contribution to Mozilla? Does it feel better to have your own pet-project than to add your (anonymous) contribution to the mail codebase?
That was always the problem at Netscape/Mozilla: EGO. Look at JWZ, RickG, KippH, Adreesen. Big mouths, big plans, but falling short on delivery.
I don't even KNOW who works in the IE dept. at MS and they kicked Netscape's ass all the way to AOL.
Shame on you!
You miss the point. Mozilla isn't meant to be an end-user browser, at least not in the long term. It's a platform from which people can develop their own Internet applications (web primarily, also email, IRC, web design). Mozilla provides a really nice HTML renderer (Gecko), a really nice GUI standard (XUL), and lots of other code, to let people go out and make their own applications.
If you try out Phoenix/Galeon/etc. you'll notice they all have many features that Mozilla doesn't, and have all chosen to specialise in oe particular area. GNOME users will love Galeon, users of slow machines will love Phoenix, and so on.
That there is now a fork in the mail project is a testament to the great success of Mozilla. It will have really suceeded when we have several different mail clients, web browsers, chat clients and web designers all branched from Mozilla, all filling a different niche, all compatable with one another, and all sharing excellent new features and ideas.
link clicks and attachments end up going to mozilla browser windows instead of the preferred browser.
:P ).
/etc/unituitivename/.hidden_weird_config_file and add the line "faj3fs.kfj.browserN = phoenix", but in the normal settings dialogue. (gaim does this, but there are very few others that I have seen that do).
This has been my major gripe with much of the KDE tools (and pretty much any integrated system which simply assumes you must be running all of their tools because you happen to like one). I run phoenix, and getting knewsticker or kmerlin (msn client) to open links in phoenix is pretty much impossible (yes yes.. I know.. use the source luke and all that, but thats time I dont have at the moment - too busy posting to slashdot
And the other example in windows, where any link you click automanically (sic) opens everything in iexplore, despite setting the default browser as phoenix.
A cry out to developers.. please please PLEASE if you have highlighted links in your app, let the user configure which browser they want to start it up in. And not through some weird edit
What I would love to see (and will start writing myself when I have some extra time in a few months unless someone starts before me) is a cross platform, centralized data, M2-like (M2 is Opera 7's client with heavy use of virtual folders a la Evolution), easy to use mail client that supports flowed text, does not display the HTML version of email if a text part is available, does not download images unless I tell it to (on a per-message basis), syncronizes with Palm devices, has a spell checker and has PGP or GPG integration. And a full featured address book is a must as well, that also syncronizes with Palm devices. Calendar and todo list are secondary, but also welcome additions. I guess I am really looking for the offsping of M2 and Outlook.
If something like that exists, please let me know. The closes I found so far is M2.