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New Mozilla-based Mail Client: Minotaur

Posted by michael on from the feeping-creaturitis dept.

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."

2 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Stability by Malc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Why? Oh Why? WHY?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!