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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."

3 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: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.

  3. 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).