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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.
It's the beginning of the end for Thunderbird and Mozilla.
Expect the Mozilla tablet next.
And tell them to go find something else to work on. Firefox is officially trash now, never used thunderbird (but I don't know anyone else that does either so whatever) and I know I for wont be touching firefox os after seeing how bad the browser platform has gotten in the last couple years.
Boy was that leaked fast. I've been using thunderbird for years and never have had much trouble with the mail client. Its pretty stable. Probably won't hurt anything to temporarily take resources off of it. But I hope they don't discontinue it entirely. I feel its way better than Outlook.
With all the developers moving, they will finally have the resources necessary to change the Firefox UX all over again. Hurrah!
In all seriousness though, I'd rather they move resources to where they could be more useful. Although, I'm not sure Firefox OS is the right move either.
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.
We've just switched over to Zimbra and all the thick clients are going away soon, so at least this won't be ammunition for the people who want to use Outlook. :P
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
that shit was more bloated and shitty than firefox
Thunderbird is the only effective way to restore the functionality on Windows that Microsoft took away by removing Outlook Express, short of being frog marched by Microsoft into its own creepy cloud.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Its definitly time to retire thunderbird. It has been around forever and while its never been a bad email client, its not nearly as popular as it once was. Mozilla has enough other projects its working on to still be distracted by this. Thunderbird must be one of the oldest clients out there that was still developed.
http://interserver.net/
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.
Well, as a Thunderbird user I don't think this is the end of the world, for now. It's not like they really change anything between versions anymore anyway. Email is pretty much a known thing, and the client gets the job done. There's not a whole lot of innovation going on for desktop clients anymore. Plus, fewer people are using them. The danger is that they so understaff it that things stop working and don't get fixed, but I guess we'll see.
Then of course I read they're going to shift the people over to something completely ridiculous like Firefox OS. Mozilla is really all over the map these days, and the product is suffering for it. Firefox OS is just a stupid idea that will never gain any real traction or have any impact, and most of Mozilla's "goals" these days are terrible. Pretty much any time they touch the UI now they make it worse.
At the rate they're going, the time to migrate away will be coming soon.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I don't use Thunderbird so I really don't have anything useful to add to the discussion. But I did want to ask a semi-off-topic question:
I use GMail now and one of the features I love the most is being able to Google search through my messages. If I type a coworker's name, for example, almost immediately I see a list of all the emails I had pertaining to that person. One of the reasons I moved to GMail is because the same task in Outlook involved several minutes of sifting through all my emails and digging up results.
So here's my question: Let's say I wanted to ditch GMail and instead have all my email sitting on my computer, like I went back to Outlook or switched to Thunderbird or something like that. Is there a client out there that can do Google'esque searches with the same approximate speed?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
ohh right that company that makes firefox what version they at 666?
It's made by some of the people that used to make Thunderbird, back before the last realignment of resources. It's like Thunderbird, but made with the modern internet in mind. It is commercial, but the licenses are affordable enough if you really love mail.
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
...and as such it oes what a company does: it tries to maximize profits.
Are they going to put Thunderbird and Eudora on the same update cycle since they both run on PCs?
It's been almost 10 years since the Phoenix project which became Firefox and Thunderbird was started. A complete rewrite of the memory management engine for a start (instead of the hacky "memfix") plus a sane versioning system that only bumps major numbers once every ESR cycle. Also Thunderbird needs to stick around. Even though most people use webmail there are still plenty of uses for traditional mail or we will go back to the bad old days of "Outlook Express".
Mozilla helped us get out of the IE6 era, but now it needs to compete with Chrome which is a much more brutal competitor.
Lightning, the calendar - addon for thunderbird, is the only aspect of thunderbird development where I feel some work is still needed, but apparently there are no resources available for it. For years.
This may turn out to be somewhat offtopic, I'm not at all sure about the actual relation of the sunbird/lightning and the thunderbird dev team and whether the decision has effects for the lightning development.
However, thunderbird and lightning are so tightly integrated that deficiencies in lightning look like thunderbird problems to me.
I think of tasks administration in lightning:
- support for hierarchical tasks (allow subtasks)
- sync with Google Tasks
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194863 is nine years old and still has status New.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
I hope this move is because the client is stable. I have become a huge fan of Thunderbird, it's hands down the nicest, easiest to use e-mail client I've encountered. Really like how it lets me work and stays out of the way. There are a few minor bugs here and there, but they're things a few developers could tackle, no need for a large team. The client seems stable and functional, they probably don't need many people to maintain it.
Let's face it, this plan is bullshit. You'll get Chrome-like updates every six weeks with.. well, nothing new. Mozilla just invented numerous updates with no content, the worst of two worlds. But it gets worse: Thunderbird's codebase is complex enough, expecting community contributions which will accept to deal with regular Gecko updates doesn't make sense (don't count on Canonical on this). At some point Mozilla folks will just wave their hands and say "sorry guys and gals, there are no contributions, end of story". They just can't say so yet.
All this for what? Firefox OS aka B2G? The problem is that there's no way they can compete against Android. New SoCs will target exactly the price points they're aiming at ($50 to $100 devices). Who would chose Firefox OS with no native apps rather than an Android device with hundreds of thousands of apps? Hell, Firefox (the browser) doesn't even work on my low end device. And how on earth diverting resources from Thunderbird is going the help with this? In short, they're panicking and will lose on both Firefox OS and Thunderbird. All this when Firefox is bleeding users to Chrome.
Mozilla needs to get its act together. Abandoning the mobile OS bandwagon and refocusing on its core goals (Firefox, Thunderbird, Lightning) would be a good start.
When they stop releasing a new version of Firefox every two weeks - let me know. It's really tiresome. Maybe they should just schedule their updates with Windows Update. Yeah, I know - makes way too much sense. I can hear the howling now.
With all the ridiculous rendering bugs in Thunderbird, and the complete lack of response from anyone who may be "developing" it, how can they claim they are now ending development. TBird dev stopped years ago. And yes, it would be nice if Firefox actually stabilized for more than a few months. I just love all the "This addon is incompatible..." messages.
was lost. Webmail is not just better than client based mail, it's INFINITELY better. Look, people. It's simple. You get an e-mail, you want to save it for future reference, save it to your local machine, your thumb drive, or whatever, and be done with it. Otherwise, acknowledge receipt, or don't, and carry on with your lives. It's a good thing e-mails take up almost no space on a machine, physically. What you do when you refuse to delete old messages that most of you don't need, is like what hoarders do. You don't really need an e-mail from six years ago in which your best friend goes on for 2.7kB about the minutia of how she picked out her prom dress. Even if it's more recent data, you still don't need it anymore, that's what Facebutt and Splitter are for.
The truth is, guys and dolls, few people use something like Thunderbird anymore. Most people are using web-based e-mail, or even have moved on from that, and are now using texting, skyping, facebutting, or twatering to do what they used to do with e-mail. Sadly, I think one of the greatest impellers of that trend has been the ineffectiveness of e-mail, (a flaw inherent in its design,) in stemming the tide of SPAM messages. Combine that with all the worms and trojans, etc., that would broadcast themselves along with random documents from your local drive across the internet to everyone in your address/contact books, and you have a recipe for people abandoning the concept of e-mail itself in droves, which is what we're starting to see.
This is a good thing, Boot-to-Gecko* or Firefox OS is a much more important thing for them to be doing, and spending their time on than some unimportant e-volutionary dead-end like Thunderbird that just really doesn't matter that much anymore
* Boot to Gecko should not be confused with the new Insurance OS they're working on which when you wake it up from sleep or boot afresh offers to save you 15% or more on your car insurance.
to work I'm doing, and arms and 3ick bootoms butt. Wipe (Click Here
This is not an urgent scoop that can't wait for the official announcement in two days. The submitter was a dick for leaking it, and timothy was unprofessional for approving it.
1. Thunderbird, IMO, could improve greatly with a UI redesign. It's a good program -- don't get me wrong. But to just declare that it's "about as good as it can get" and give up most of the support for the project seems a bit arrogant to me. I hate change for the sake of change (which is really what I felt most of Microsoft Office 2007 gave people vs. version 2003, with everything moved around to different places as the "ribbon bar" menu was created). But especially for Windows users, Thunderbird mail client has the look of some sort of project ported over from Linux. A lot of little things like the graphics for the buttons and even the default fonts used just don't have the polish of a client like Outlook.
2. I haven't yet seen a mail client yet for a PC that really does IMAP the way I'd like to see it implemented. That is to say, presenting all of the folders just like users are used to seeing and working with them when they use a standard POP3/SMTP client. Google makes a confusing mess for most users when they connect Gmail with IMAP to clients like Outlook, and all I ever hear about using Thunderbird instead is "you trade a few of those issues off for many other new ones".
3. Sure, webmail is growing in popularity all the time. But it's not really ideal for people who need to work with a lot of mail attachments. With a full blown client, you can simply double-click on attachments and immediately open them to view/print them - even if the files are for less common applications you might be using (various CAD packages, etc.). Webmail forces the extra step of downloading the attachment someplace on your local PC, before you can go find where you saved it and open it. It's also a lot slower, at times. I know with my Yahoo web-mail for example, sometimes I click to simply re-read a message I viewed earlier and I may get as much as a 10 second pause before the page refreshes, depending on their server load.
4. Your final reason would basically be telling me I need to rewrite Thunderbird myself, if I want the above things.... Since I'm not a software developer, that's a really TALL order and it's just not likely to happen. That doesn't mean I haven't worked in I.T. for over 20 years though and set applications up for many different people besides just myself, where I see some of these needs. That's really the problem with open source at the end of the day. It's great if you're a developer ... but the vast majority of people running a given piece of code are its end-users. If the devs can't/won't/don't take a keen interest in updating their code based on what the USERS want, it may as well not exist as a mainstream application after a while.
I'd agree with you, except for the fact Microsoft replaced Outlook Express with Windows Live Mail. Sure, it doesn't typically come pre-installed with a given copy of Windows (though that depends on what some of the OEMs decided to put into their pre-loaded image), but you can download it for free from Microsoft Updates as part of the whole "Windows Live" bundle of free add-on programs.
Windows Live Mail even auto-migrates an existing Outlook Express mail configuration if you like.
My computer doesn't have this issue with Thunderbird 13...
There are bugs in the Thunderbird UI and elsewhere that have persisted for a timespan of years when they've been reported to GetSatisfaction and Bugzilla. (E.g., 'new' message status is handled very poorly and inconsistently.) Really this announcement is a public admission of what some of us could already see was true: Mozilla hasn't given a damn about Thunderbird since it was split off from the browser. Really that split was more about taking out the trash than making it thrive on its own. They've thrown in the towel at the messaging match to Microsoft and focused on trying to win the browser bout. I wish they'd just get it over with and fully disown Thunderbird so that others who do give a damn can do something with it.
I wouldn't care myself, and would have reverted to Outlook some years ago, were it not for the existence of "portable" versions of Thunderbird and my current reliance on that portability. I keep it and some other portable apps on external storage to ensure that my messaging history is always consistently with me regardless which or whose computer I'm using. I wish I could do that with Outlook and ditch the bad behaviors of Thunderbird, but the only means to do it with Outlook are all much more kludgy than the portabilized Thunderbird.
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).
One of the often-overlooked benefits of Thunderbird is how well it works in a small office environment, with a mix of systems and operating systems. Migrating all your emails and settings from Mac to Windows (and vice-versa) is as simple as copying over the Profiles folder.
Personally, I oversee six different email addresses – including personal hotmail and gmail, and a few different ones for various lines of work – and Thunderbird lets me easily check all my email in one fell swoop. While I do like Mail.app, but I still haven't found a way to segregate my inboxes they way I want them in that program.
On Monday Mitchell Baker will be posting on the future of Thunderbird. We'd like you to be aware of it before it goes public. However, this is *confidential* until the post is pushed live Monday afternoon PDT. Please don't tweet, blog or discuss on public mailing lists before then.
A few days ago I asked whether Mozilla could be counted on to remain committed to FirefoxOS, such that it would be a wise choice for anybody to adopt.
Just a few days later, Mozilla pulls resources off of their #2 application to assign them to the New Shiny.
If I had suggested that Mozilla couldn't even be counted on to remain committed to Thunderbird, you guys would have rightly laughed at the suggestion.
So, now I'm left wondering if Mozilla can be counted on to keep developing the desktop version of Firefox.
Somebody has dollar signs in their eyes over app-store percentages and emerging markets populations, don't they?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
(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!
I hope T-bird will live long because it's the only email client I know for the Mac that lets you keep your important mail on a Samba server on your LAN. Very handy because I can now read the same old mails on my laptop and my desktop at home.
-- Cheers!
E.g. not i.e.!!
Since I felt a need to protect my aging mother from the cesspool that is Hotmail, I removed every trace of the Windows Live suite from her computer (which took some doing) and replaced them with non-evil alternatives with interfaces she knows. For email Thunderbird turned out to be the winner.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If you're still interested in contributing to Thunderbird development, especially to improve its UX, then the “parity with Postbox” meta-bug would be a good place to start. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=737347
You are comparing Firefox 3.6 and 4.0 (both out of even long term support) to last years versions of Chrome and IE and complaining about RAM usage? Sure, 3.6 or 4 is an old memory hungry beast that's slow at javascript and whatnot. You should be comparing the latest version before whining. Not that I particularly like Firefox's RAM hunger, but this is just plain unfair whining about something that's had major improvements the last year.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Maybe they could open source it so it could still be maintained.
Oh, right.
How about working on the 64-bit version? Yes, I know about Waterfox, but come on guys, upgrade the main build!
And keep working on Thunderbird. Also, bring back Sunbird.
I am John Hurt.
!!
Are you annotating a chess match?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Was there any mention if their efforts to maintain lightning would lighten ? I have an obsessive compulsive need*** to put all actives I plan on doing in a calendar and would [have in the past] literally start writing on my arm in waterproof ink if my Google Calendars can't be accessed from Thunderbird. I also have an obsessive compulsive need to have the same look and feel between apps and as a result struggle with Gmail and Gcal in the browser. And yes I had to stop to alter my daily agenda to allow extra time in my morning web surfing activities to post this message. ***I frequently dream about what activities I plan on doing the next day, down to extreme detail, down to when I think I will take toilet breaks. This leads to frequent cases of Deja Vu as I am compelled to carry out those activities are planned.
thunderbird has become unusable. Search has become a mess, threads aren't better.
cb
I've downloaded the source to Thunderbird a few times when I got frustrated that something was broken and figured I'd try to fix it. The code is terrible.
Well, that's too harsh. What I should say is that it's written without thought of user supported patches. Features I've been waiting on for years just died at various points in times. Simple things like sharing address books between applications or syncing to a phone just never were realized. The developers whining at the users with comments like "unless you're willing to write the replacement" doesn't help. Obviously, the developer isn't willing to write it either so we're at an impass.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382876
So what's the alternative? Not web based email, that's inflexible for various reasons. Getting something that will do multiple mailboxes, encryption/signing, just those two are show stoppers for everyone. Hushmail can do the second but not the first. It's still a WIP for Zimbra and most other web suites. I'm carefully watching Zimbra and waiting for the last couple of things I need and maybe I'll be able to officially be clientless.
I'm going to check on evolution again and see if it's up to par. My initial problems with it were related to it not having a windows version and the lack of certain features, but things may have changed.
mozilla confirms it.
I agree with all of the top level posts. I like Thunderbird the way it is.......nice and simple. The idea of it not getting bloated out is nice. I've also seen slack maintenance on it over the years.
Maybe the coolest thing to do is for Firefox to keep the same number of developers on Thunderbird until they work through ever single bug ticket, then put it into "maintenance", updating it only to keep it running in new operating system versions, hardware etc.
Nauseous means tending to cause sickness or feelings of sickness. You probably meant "nauseated". It's okay, it's a common mistake. I'm not trying to teach you how to write in English, just trying to make you aware that what you wrote and what you probably meant are very far apart.
As for the complaints about Java being replied to, I'll toss in my $0.02... I agree. I just hope Firefox OS supports Noscript, and has provisions for native apps. If all it can do is run things inside a browser window, I think I'll pass. However, system resource hogging sounds like a processor power management or memory management problem, that the Moz Squad will hopefully address before the beta. :^)
That said, I agree with the direction of cutting back on development of stuff people don't need or use anymore in favor of having an option that doesn't involve the evils of Microsoft, Google, or Apple, or the screaming headaches of Linux/Unix.
I need to put my glasses on. I thought the subject was "Mozilla Downshitting Development of Thunderbird" then again, it sounds like the same thing.
Well, since Tbird is supposed to be sending email, its development should have stopped ages ago...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
there's only so much "usefull" stuff a email client can/needs to do.
how about a thunderbird server? preferably usable with a simple
portforward rule on the cable/adsl router, and about 500kb in
size (not counting the email/database/storage)? ty
The search now looks nice but is pretty lame. If you search for "one two" (with the quotes)
it will find any message that has one or two. Arg.
I keep thinking the same thing regarding a centralized address book between Pidgin, TB & such. Although it looks like KDE is getting close with KMail & their Kopete replacement app.
Gawd, I miss Kopete.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
So, much predicted death of the email service is moving far away in the future. Again.
So they will just let this wither and die off, in favor of 'just us Gmail - its cool, its in the cloud'. No thanks. i like having my mail store local and under MY control.
So when Thunderbird does goes away ( and it will ), any cross platform suggestions, short of setting up my own fetch+imap server and using something like squirrel locally?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Been a business user since TB came out. AFAIR all the stability issues were eliminated around version 1. Starting from version 3 TB started feeling bit overdeveloped - tabs and all that sorts of flashy extensions. Looking at current status: out of the box working MS Exchange calendar support (with Lightning plugin), clean interface (compared to Outlook), decent migratability between Windows and Unix desktops - just copy the settings folder. Bottom line: TB has become a mature product and thus the refocusing is rather justified.
The developers whining at the users with comments like "unless you're willing to write the replacement" doesn't help. Obviously, the developer isn't willing to write it either so we're at an impass.
It has been like that even before 2007. Tb management broke somewhere around first Mozilla milestones. I think the guy who was responsible (a.k.a.: had clue) for the Messenger development has left Netscape and that's when basically the end begun.
Later on, Mozilla has made the final stab at Tb and adopted the same management as for the Fx. Tb never recovered from it. And Mozilla still doesn't get the difference between a browser and a MUA.
Still remember one devel in a bug advising me as a workaround to delete my Tb profile and create it anew. After all - that works like charm for the Firefox!!
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Maybe part of the problem is, with these large development organizations, and the turnover they incur, individual developers feel less of a sense of ownership over the project (which is also a product, regardless of price). With that comes less pride in their workmanship, and motivation and quality suffer.
Sometimes I think smaller projects are better for FOSS (with notable exceptions, like the kernel, Apache, etc, which tend to be more foundational projects than user-facing ones).
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
And then they overburdened it with tons of bizzare and useless 'features'. Thunderbird is much better, we desperately need it to survive and outlive the cloud hype.
I'm a great fan of Mozilla's products; they're some of the last remaining open source, cross platform, standards-compliant offerings from a company that isn't building their tech with data mining everything I do, in mind. For those of us that don't want everything completely in "The Cloud" and have interest in privacy, there are few other email clients out there and none I've found better than Thunderbird (especially on Windows - Kmail and Evolution etc... can do well in Linux along with your old school pine/mutt etc...). It works, efficiently.
Thunderbird puts all my email accounts at my command from one central location. It also gives me the "full" compliment of Email features and the option to configure them as I choose. Its also relatively easy to use and setup even for novices; much like Firefox it has found the FOSS holy grail of providing accessibility and tutorials for beginners (see: If you want to set up a gmail, hotmail, or other "normal" webmail account it already knows many of the specifications thereof. It also can easily walk you through setting up a new account for say, your ISPs mail) without compromising features for advanced users. I'm not beholden to "The Cloud" - I can locally store my mail and info as I wish. Its plugin API provides for all sorts of things from international dictionaries to Enigmail to Lightning. For email alone, it has everything I need and quite a few features available if I need them in the future. I
However, I'd like to see it go further and be made into a full fledged Outlook replacement - this is NOT a huge jump. All the pieces are there and it will only take a little time and refinement to make it so. Thunderbird already supports contacts/addressbook/PIM features in open formats. A few more wizards and whatnot and it would likely take care of what most would need and easily at that. Perhaps a few others can suggest some PIM features, but I'm pretty much set...unless they did something like KeePass integration and whatnot for storing various keys and secure data. Calendaring/Tasks is the big one - Lightning/Sunbird is a great start, but they only need a few improvements for both local and remote calendars, but I think with CalDAV and other options we can have a nice open set of calendar formats and some wizarding to make their creation and management easier. Thunderbird could probably even interact with Exchange if necessary, now days. Likewise, Tasks/ToDo could be brought up to par. Finally, the big thing necessary is proper sync support to tie it all together. Multiple calendars with their own tasks, integrating PIM to allow contacts to interact with calendars and their tasks, syncing with various mobile devices etc... all of this stuff could really make Thunderbird a first-rate email/newsgroup/PIM client, able to stand up to Outlook and make most home users and even a great many businesses choose the lock-in free solution instead.
I don't want to see Mozilla let Thunderbird wither on the vine when, for a relatively modest investment of time and energy, it could be polished to a sparkling shine. Mozilla seems to be one of the last bastions of privacy-respecting software for best accessing the Internet on the user's terms AND is capable of bringing that paradigm even to novices with easy to use, efficient software and tons of useful features. When everyone else is creating tools where control is taken out of the user's hands, putting up their walled gardens and making "the cloud" look as attractive as possible, I want Mozilla working hard to improve their tools to show that moving forward doesn't mean giving up what's important. I'm glad that Thunderbird, FOSS as it is, will thankfully not "die", but I think its wrong for Mozilla to toss it onto the back burner when they should be polishing it to a shine. Thunderbird is Mozilla's second most popular and visible software with a wide userbase, and like Firefox it deserves attention necessary to put it atop competitors offerings, and keep it there!
I wish they'd just get it over with and fully disown Thunderbird so that others who do give a damn can do something with it.
You seem rather unclear on the concept of open source. Anyone who cares can contribute to Thunderbird development. Anyone who has a better idea for its direction can take the code and fork it, even turn it back into a commercial product. And they have, there's a list of e-mail clients based on Thunderbird on Wikipedia, one of which is Postbox for $30.
Only in the minds of entitled armchair whiners does Mozilla paying salaries for Thunderbird engineers and even a messaging team for years somehow equate to "not giving a damn." The reality is there's little interest and clearly no money in a standalone e-mail client, and it's somewhat tangential to Mozilla's mission. As users moved to web mail and ISP-provided clients, Mozilla's various experiments to do cool collaborative and communication things with Thunderbird didn't have much impact.
(I've used the SeaMonkey browser-editor-mail-IRC suite since it was Netscape Navigator 2.0. SeaMonkey 2.11 remains a solid useful product with all the performance and memory wins of recent Firefox, and I really appreciate the talented few who keep it going with the aid of Mozilla's infrastructure.)
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Abandoning desktop Firefox is just FUD, you're overreaching. Meanwhile if a thriving web of millions of sites that run on any browser is supplanted by proprietary apps supplied by closed app stores, then the web loses. Firefox OS and a Mozilla app store platform are entirely appropriate counter-reactions to that trend that are aligned with Mozilla's mission.
What's your solution, or do you not even think there's a problem? Should Mozilla not even take on challenging tasks that might fail?
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Possible benefit to vendors: it's an alternative to Android that's based on industry standards and thus with much less lock-in.
Also Telefonica claims it "will be more open than Android, and will run on lower-specification hardware", we'll see about the latter. The HTML5 UI layer "Gaia" and the additional web APIs are well-isolated from hardware, hence there are nightly builds of B2G for Mac and Windows without the phone part. From the architectural overview Mozilla's initial smartphone target is a "Gonk" hardware abstraction layer on top of parts of the Android runtime and an Android kernel, but people are already porting to generic Linux + framebuffer/Open GL.
I suspect the development isn't easier than a native Android or iOS port, but if you've got a web site or HTML version of your app, then the additional work to make it an installable web app is minimal; besides, a lot of Android and iOS webOS apps are just HTML5 under the covers. Tizen, Blackberry OS, even Windows Phone — everyone who isn't yet successful in phones and tablets — are all promoting development using HTML5 technologies.
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I applied for a posted Thunderbird job at the Mozilla Foundation about a year ago, saying that, but I never heard back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop
My own fumbling efforts in that direction (I have some new stuff I've made recently that is not yet up there):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
More comments by me on the idea:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The real problem is an erosion of IMAP capability in e-mail products. A web-based e-mail offering is a proprietary e-mail solution, and providers will only offer interoperability tools like IMAP if the market demands it. Well, as more and more mailboxes are served by a smaller number of "cloud" providers, the market is beginning to say interoperability is not so important any more. Or at the least, customers are making choices without considering the potential for future vendor lock-in due to decisions made today.
With decent to excellent IMAP capable products historically available, I've been able to mix and match e-mail clients and servers, and to migrate e-mail from server solution to server solution, since 1991. All with relative ease, and no loss of information. An e-mail future without IMAP would likely mean significant barriers to migration, which is all win for established e-mail providers and all loss for everyone else, especially customers.