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Mozilla Lightning Plans to Unify Mail & Calendar

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the here's-hoping-it-works-out dept.

Neil writes "The Mozilla Foundation has published an initial roadmap for 'Lightning', the project to integrate its calendar application Sunbird with its email application Thunderbird."

6 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Re:New? by nine-times · · Score: 5, Informative
    I thought a calendar was already available for Thunderbird as a plugin.

    It is, and yet Thunderbird still isn't a suitable replacement for Outlook in corporate environments. From what I understand, Lightning aims to fix that.

  2. Re:Dogfood? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    "dogfood bugs" are usability issues, according to:
    http://www.mozilla.org/editor/dogfood.html

  3. Re:Dogfood? by pyros · · Score: 4, Informative
    What exactly is a "dogfood bug," in this context?

    Any bug that prevents them from using the project internally as their official corporate calendar app.

  4. Article title misleading by augustz · · Score: 4, Informative
    Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird.

    Thunderbird is doing what it always does. Keep a lightweight email client around, but for those who want/need calander, they can install an extension to give it to them. A lot of good ideas show up in this.

    Futher, this is not a Mozilla Foundation annoucement.

    Q. Will this be Mozilla Lightning(TM)? Is this an official Mozilla Foundation product?
    A. "Lightning" is simply a project code name to keep from having to type or say "Thunderbird extension for tightly-integrated calendar functionality" all the time. The Mozilla Foundation has not yet announced any plans to add Lightning to its set of supported products under any name; indeed, such an announcement would be premature, as the exact composition of Lightning is still very much under discussion.


    A good wiki page on it all is here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning
  5. Re:Why not by n0-0p · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is actually an intelligent response to everyone making this same tired joke. The Mozilla Foundation retargeted development on seperate applications to simplify things for most users. With that done, one of the next major steps (2.0 timeframe) is to break all the shared functionality out into XulRunner (currently being actively developed).

    Eventually all of the apps (FF, TB, SB) will use XulRunner but still be developed and distributed as seperate applications. This should provide the best of both worlds. It will have the tight integration and lower resource usage of the single suite, but without requiring everyone to deal with the headaches of one big monolithic application.

    To anyone interested I'd really advise heading over to the Mozilla wiki and taking a look at what's going.

  6. Re:New? by nine-times · · Score: 5, Informative
    It's probably not an "excuse". There aren't any real drop-in replacements for Outlook's functionality in Windows.

    What's even worse is the situation on the Mac side. Microsoft doesn't even make a real OSX Exchange client. There's Outlook 2001, which only runs in OS9/Classic, and then there's Entourage, which is buggy, unstable, doesn't work properly, and generally stinks. Otherwise, you're stuck with webmail or a normal IMAP client.

    In short, there is not a single OSX application that properly supports Exchange. Public folders are near useless. You can't share mailboxes, calendars, contacts, etc. Meeting requests don't even work properly.

    On linux, at least you have Evolution. Evolution is a pretty good Outlook replacement, but the Windows port isn't done, and Novell hasn't announced any plans for an OSX version (as far as I know).