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Less is More: Thunderbird 0.7 Review

Posted by michael on from the did-someone-say-thundercats? dept.

comforteagle writes "In part two of our look at Mozilla's less is more approach to thunderbird and firebird, Gareth Russell has finished the examination with a look at the newly released Thunderbird 0.7. Part one dealt with firefox and was discussed here on slashdot as well."

2 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. I am very concerned by Tarantolato · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...about the official Mozilla project's continued split focus between Firefox/Thunderbird and the full Seamonkey suite, which is now apparently going to continue even after the standalones reach 1.0.

    Mozilla's crucial mistake early on was deciding it needed to be a platform. If this had just meant developing a cross-platform gui and tools, or just developing a whole application suite, it might not have been a problem. But they decided to do both. It cost them, and it continues to cost them.

    IBM's Eclipse project is a good example of how to do a platform. Start small with one app: in Eclipse's case, an IDE. Then build the rest of the stuff around the skeleton: IBM's new Workplace package is basically built from Eclipse plugins.

    But continuing to devote resources to Seamonkey is just a bad idea. Not only is it a distraction from making the small, focused apps better; but keeping around Mozilla as an Emacs-style do-everything suite does IMHO damage to the brand name. I for one have nothing but bad memories of Netscape, because of the ungodly bloat of Communicator. Any project that continues to officially perpetuate that mistake loses respect in my mind, and I would guess in many others' as well.

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  2. Thunderbird Wishlist by JBMcB · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Integration with GnuPG and/or PGP. Yes I know of engimail, I think it's essential enough it should be built-in.

    2. Integration with Jabber. IM + Email would be cool. I like how Windows Messenger does this, but with Thunderbird it would actually be secure :)

    3. Better LDAP integration. Current LDAP implementation is kludgy, I wish they would make it smoother.

    4. Fix the calendar app. It's nice, but could be a whole lot nicer. The original Netscape calendar app wasn't bad, I much prefer it over Outlook.

    5. Import/Export filters. There are third party filters already, it would be nice if they were built in. Import .mbox, maildirs, Outlook PST, Outlook Express directories, Eudora, MacOS Mail.app, etc...

    6. How about a text mode interface for uberhackers? It could be really lightweight, just ctrl- to go back and forth, ctrl-r to reply, etc...

    That's it. It shouldn't add too much bloat, the basic Jabber protocol is small and GnuPG integration should be cake. Any other ideas?

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