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Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla will be announcing next week that they will effectively be taking away resources from Thunderbird's development. Mozilla believes it's better for the developers behind the open-source e-mail client to work on other projects, i.e. Firefox OS. They claim they will not be outright stopping Thunderbird." You can also read the letter at pastebin.
Well, lets face it, the last major contribution to email was the "discussions view". Not much has changed in the way of email. The standards have been the same, the security is over an SSL standard, the display is either plain text or HTML, and anti-spam is handled by people like spamhaus.
What more is there for email?
Exactly. The browser was perfectly adequate back in the 3.0 days.
In fact, server auto-discovery has made it difficult to configure Tbird on my systems, since I do my own imapd but rely on my ISP's smtp.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Thunderbird isn't a commercial product. It doesn't have to add arbitrary bullet points every 18 months so they can sell an upgrade. There is eventually a point where it's good enough and adding anything to it would detract. If only more software would do this.
I don't like Thunderbird (hilarious bugs like this one are part of the reason why), but it's what most people at work use on Windows. Mac users primarily use OSX mail.app. I also find the searching majorly FUBAR.
So now that Thunderbird is getting fewer resources, are there any other options? What other clients are people using on windows?
This isn't a bad thing.
Let's start with the biggest reason: now they can't completely ruin it with a redesign. On an "active" project, you eventually run out of stuff to do. No new features to add, no glaring design problems, just boring bugs and maintenance. So you're eventually going to do some big overhaul, some big redesign, if only to justify being an active, major project. See: almost every major desktop environment. Sometimes a big redesign is necessary, but quite often, the change is just for the sake of change. Downshifting development means you don't need to "justify" your project's existence - you're just maintaining it, fixing bugs and minor issues, keeping up with the times. Because let's face it, there's only so many features you can add to an email client.
Second reason: how many people don't even use a dedicated email program anymore? I haven't used one in years (discounting the GMail app on my phone, that doesn't count). I just use a website, either GMail or whatever that online Outlook is. It's faster, and I *always* have a browser open anyways, so why not? Sure, some people will actually need features they don't have, or maybe just want a dedicated email program anyways. That's fine - Thunderbird still exists for those people. But I do not doubt that the potential userbase is shrinking.
Third and final reason: it's open source. If you really think they are no longer doing a good job with it, do it yourself. Fork it. Fix it. If you need help, you'll find people, as long as the work is worth doing.
It gets even worse when you have to get at your imap servers over an ssh-forwarded port. Prior to auto-discovery it was pretty easy. Now it's hit-or-miss.
"Just works" (TM) is great when it does, or when you need to do something slightly unusual. Then it just gets in your way. That's the thing that bothers me most about people trying to make Linux "user friendly", because it can only ever be "mostly user friendly" and when they do that they usually also take away the hacker hooks.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
never used thunderbird (but I don't know anyone else that does either so whatever)
I used Thunderbird for a while. Had to remove it after I got mad enough at it. The rich text editor in it was broken - it refused to use fonts that I wanted, reverting back at every opportunity. Also it loved to eat ends of lines - all of them in one big bite. Start typing your reply, press END, press DEL and now the first line of the quoted text is sitting at the cursor.
Eventually I got tired of that and reverted to the Dark Side. (Or is it Yellow Side now?) At least it works. This is not the year 2000 to endlessly mess with MUAs. I want my email to work, and the best MUA to do it gets the job.
I have used Thunderbird for a long time, and am sad to see developers being removed from it. I don't want my mail in "the cloud," especially when the cloud fails. Web browsers suck for managing email, and the stand-alone client does a far superior job. I can have a back-up of my own messages, and view them off-line any time I want. Stop ceding your privacy, and power, to "the cloud." When it comes back to bite you, you will regret it. "Oh, you want to access your old email? We archived it, and there is a fee to have us reload it for you." Just wait, it will happen.
I started with Netscape Mail in 1995 and then painlessly moved to Thunderbird when it was released. I've been with it ever since then and am unlikely to change. Most every new release has some small but nice improvement, and no major detriments of the sort that Firefox has suffered. I refuse to use the vaunted cloud or any sort of webmail.
Integrated PGP support. You have to install some weird 3rd party plug-in to get what's been standard in other mail clients for a decade.
Mail is insecure unless you encrypt it. This should be the default.
Under the ECPA of 1986, all mail left on the server after 180 days is fair game. Law enforcement does not need a warrant, just a subpoena, and you'd better cough up the mail. This is because back in 1986, all mail clients stored locally. Leaving your mail on the server all the time was considered rude, frankly. It's your shit, take it and get out of here.
26 years later, people are encouraged to leave their mail on the server for years. Google even goes so far as to tell people they don't ever have to delete. But the law has not changed. It's still the same old ECPA which assumes you don't give two cents for stuff you left on the server for more than 6 months.
Tbird and other mail clients allow you to grab the mail off the server and delete it off the server and store it locally. Once this is done, and the mail is in your possession only, it is no longer covered by the ECPA, but rather the 4'th and 5'th amendments to the US Constitution.
--
BMO
Mozilla jumped the shark when they replaced started taking design decisions away from programmers and putting them in the hands of "user experience designers" who are nothing more than glorified fashion designers. Mozilla's "user experience team" has 25(!) people on it (http://blog.mozilla.org/ux/who-we-are/). How many people does it take to design an interface for a browser? Every new release of Firefox copies more things from Chrome and dumbs down the interface in the process.
I like having a status bar. I do not want the add-ons manager, the preferences manager, or the download manager in a tab because I am using a windowing operating system with a high resolution display. I do not like being forced to wade though about:config because putting some semblance of actual configurability in the options screen is not in vogue. I do not want to have to install 20 add-ons just to get some semblance of a usable browser.
I ditched Firefox for Seamonkey. It is the continuation of the original Mozilla suite, based on the up-to-date Firefox code but without most of the stupidity (unfortunately, they don't have enough developers on the project to undo ALL of the stupidity that comes from upstream). It is also compatible with most Firefox addons (either directly or through porting which is mostly a simple find/replace affair).
Why would you *want* that? One well-crafted malicious PDF coupled with a flawed PDF reader, and you're SOL.
Firstly, I run Linux, not Windows. On Linux the pdf opens in Okular, which uses libpoppler, which has not had a vulnerability in quite some time, unlike the secret binary crap from Adobe. Secondly, there is no difference in security between immediately opening a malicious appllication versus first saving the malicious application to disk then opening it. If you want to slowly compromise your Windows machine with an extra few clicks, be my guest. I will stick with Linux, which doesn't have these issues thanks. And so I can actually use the computer in the way it was meant to be used, not the way the spammers force you to.
Think about this: any new vulnerability in Linux is headline news because it happens so rarely. Usually the fix is within a few hours and new binaries are available for update *at my convenience* a few hours later. With Windows, new vulnerabilities are so commonplace that they are hardly worth mentioning, and good luck getting an update from Microsoft in any timely way.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
True, but Seamonkey, like the current Eudora, is based upon Thunderbird. No more Thunderbird updates, fewer Seamonkey and Eudora updates.
The ______ Agenda
There aren't really any non-niche replacement options for ThunderBird or Outlook since Eudora was killed by Qualcomm. I've tried several of the better ones, and they're universally painful to use.
How many people use stand-alone desktop email clients any more? (I'm not talking about Outlook, since that is really as much a shared-calendar program as it is an email app.)
I'm generally not a big fan of web apps and "the cloud" as a substitute for native apps, but unless you host your own email server, you're relying on someone else to store your email anyway. Why not use the web interface? Email is simple enough that in my experience there really isn't a lot that a native app can do that a good webmail interface can't.
(including firefox, chromium, and others)
please continue with your delusional thinking that a web browser is an operating system and that web apps are a sensible and desirable alternative to native apps.
i really really like having badly-written javascript code chewing up 100% CPU on every core of my 6-core machine doing ajaxy instant updates of data i don't care much about - that's so much better than having a reload button. all this javascript gives me all of the joy you get from the kind of crap code written by newbie PHP developers but running on my own computer instead of the server. brilliant!
i also love the power consumption from a constant load average of 8 or 12 or higher. and the 2 or 3 minutes of staring at the screen while the computer switches from one window to another on my core2 machine at work? sheer genius!
furthermore, i can't tell you how impressed i am that web sites that would have worked nicely with just fairly plain html in a tabbed browser now forces me to work in just the one tab because all that js crap just fucking breaks when you 'open in new tab'.
lovely! and totally "web-scale"!
keep up the great work!
The person who leaked this memo did so for a reason. He believes that things like confidential notices to Mozillians and planned press releases a few days later are part of where Mozilla is going wrong. The community should be informed and their feedback should be discussed openly before such decisions are made. The way that Mozilla operates today is more like any other large and secretive company than a community-driven effort. Which is, arguably, what they have become (at least judging from their revenue and the large number of employees).
Wherever you stand on this decision, the person who pasted the confidential message to Pastebin didn't do so out of spite, or because he was being "a dick", but because he's concerned about what Mozilla is becoming. Here's the commentary at the end of the leaked memo:
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari