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Mozilla May Separate Itself From Thunderbird Email Client (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A company-wide memo distributed throughout the Mozilla Foundation by chairperson Mitchell Baker argues that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird email client in order to focus on Firefox. She said, "Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies. At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird." Both projects are wasting time helping each other, and those demands are only going to get worse. She says many within Mozilla want to see it support community-managed projects without doing the bulk of the work on it, and perhaps Thunderbird could be one of those projects. Baker stresses that no decisions have been made yet — they're starting the conversation early to keep the community involved in what happens to Thunderbird.
It could still live on as an optional add-on, but focusing on making a really good browser is a great idea.
They had their time, and we've moved on.
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Unlike the Firefox "browser", Thunderbird is actually kind of useful as an application.
The Mozilla fpundation should just disband and leave their stuff for adults to handle. If there still is someone willing.
It's probably a good thing.
Seeing as how mozilla has lost their minds and are tearing out core features of firefox just because they can.
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Smart move. Laying off unknown niche products such as Thunderbird, and focusing on widely used projects such as Firefox OS. Way to go, Mozilla, I am sure that's the road to success.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
So, a community-supported Thunderbird, just like SeaMonkey? Offload everything to the community. The community then spends 80 % of its time figuring out how to fix the build breakages MozCorp introduced this month.
And then their build infrastructure gets 'best-effort' support treatment from Mozilla and then they have to wait half a year to get a OS / compiler upgrade before they can get a Windows build working.
I'm not treating this as welcome news.
(Incidentally, SeaMonkey's mail client is pretty tightly coupled with Thunderbird, and bugfixes to TB are bugfixes for SM.)
Why should Mozilla keep an Open Source email client alive?
After all, everyone loves Outlook and Windows Mail and Apple Mail, and those corporations know what's best for us.
Would the LIbreOffice project be interested in picking up Thunderbird? After all Microsoft Office has Outlook.
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
I am rather amazed that in a post-Snowden world, everyone is just totally fine with doing away with Thunderbird -- arguably one of the most important open source email systems out there. However I do understand why some large companies, such as Google (gmail) and Microsoft (outlook), might want to get rid of the competition. By the way, who is funding Mozilla these days?
They made a new HTML/Javascript email client for Firefox OS, why not work on converging the features so one email client can scale from mobile to desktop?
Am I the only person left who actually LIKES and used Thunderbird?
Enough of the "just use webmail" crap. I do in an emergency, but on established computers I live on regularly, you can't beat the better power, speed and versatility of a native email application running locally. I get far more-features in Thunderbird than my email provider's lightweight and simple web interface.
Plus Thunderbird is cross-platform and available on my variety on mixed-OS computers, giving me a consistent local-app email experience across them all.
But I suppose a good portion of the email-app-haters are the same ones as email-haters who would rather use IM, SMS and Facebook messaging rather than proper email. Get off my lawn... some of us actually use the internet for work too, not just play.
Isn;'t that what shared libraries are for?
Yes, provided that upstream can be bothered to keep a stable ABI in the shared libraries.
When advising users who want to leave Windows, I tell them to install T-bird, let it import all their emails and address book from , and copy the result to Linux, when T-bird picks it up and uses it in a "It Just Works" manner. I have never seen another migration that was so effortless. You may understand that I don't want T-bird to disappear, or updating to stop, because there needs to be a painless way to get your stuff out of the hands of the Beast.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
They want to murder XUL, because they think XUL is outdated and HTML5 is the best of the world, and implementing a small layer for servo will be too complicated and too big of a project to do it, so now they are "cutting the cords". First they announced that add-ons can't use XUL, then they killed xulrunner (which got not that much media attention), and now they want to get rid of thunderbird too. All because they think XUL is a bad technology and its all doable by HTML5 and javascript these days. Totally fogetting that HTML + js just needs a huge overhead to get native looking UI dialogs, and that XUL had tons of APIs accessible from javascript, all not accessible from the HTML platform.
I think I know what happened, and it's more logistical than technical. The new batch of developers didn't write the old code (no matter how good it was), and the new batch of managers didn't make the old decisions (no matter how good they were). As a developer, one is typically partial to one's own creations. (It's my baby now.) And as a manager, one is typically partial to one's own policies. (It's my troop now.)
My hunch is simply that the major direction changes in firefox/thunderbird coincided with the replacement of both developers and managers. The new developers had little respect for the old code, and the new managers had little respect for the old decisions, and the result is a 180-degree change of direction from both the old code and the old policies.
I agree with the sentiment, although for reasons that probably differ from Mozilla's. Mozilla has been mismanaging and making Firefox an increasingly undesirable browser. That Mozilla has pretty much been ignoring Thunderbird has meant that it has escaped much of the awfulness they have been inflicting on Firefox.
Formally making the two completely independent would be welcome to me because it would further insulate Thunderbird from the actions of Mozilla.
This is really a desire of Mozillia to separate Thunderbird from Mozillia's money. Mozillia has lots of income from Google. Thunderbird has no independent source of money and could not survive independently without Mozillia's money.
I do think Firefox and Thunderbird need to separate. There purposes are very different and they don't need a whole lot inter connectivity to each other. Thunderbird itself needs some restructuring in it's scope. That's the real problem with the Thunderbird project. Thunderbird needs to bite the bullet and be come a full PIM... yes like Outlook.
When do you ever JUST need e-mail. Just being an e-mail client is too limiting. E-mail, calendaring, tasks, contacts are so closely connecting nowadays. It is very hard to separate any of those and have them work well together. Thunderbird is still holding on to that though and it is hampering its development.
Yes I know there is lightning but it often feels like it is a half-backed hack. Thunderbird needs to connect itself with official support (or start it's own) open-source groupware server. I know there many out there but most of them have partial support at best.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I know many accountants who use Thunderbird (whole companies, as a matter of fact). They want to be able to access their email offline, and Thunderbird is safe and easy to use. All of them (4 companies, over 15 people) happened to move from Outlook to Thunderbird by just trying different email clients. They were not recommended Thunderbird by a FLOSS advocate or anything like that. Which is interesting.
This does not mean that Mozilla should not drop it: sure, focusing on FFox might be a good thing. I'm just saying that there is an actual market.
The Mozilla Foundation should be renamed the "Google's Ward Off A DOJ Monopoly Investigation Foundation" these days.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
$ mail
It's about money. If there's no kickback from Google or Yahoo, Mozilla foundation doesn't want to be bothered with it. It's no longer about being useful, you see.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
FossaMail is a fork of Thunderbird made by the Pale Moon guys.
You are using Pale Moon instead of Firefox, aren't you?
Mozilla, I have actually donated to you in the past, but I have to admit my faith and continued donations are really starting to waiver lately.
Don't get me wrong; its not because of the Australis and UI changes that many people complain about. I actually enjoy those changes, the cross-platform consistency it brought. That's not the issue.
The issue to me is that I feel like you're slowly abandoning your principles:
If you need money, tell us how it is. Lay out your plan for the next 3 years (a very specific vision!), estimate a figure of money, and maybe we can crowdsource it to happen. I think people are less likely to donate if they can't get clarity into what the money is used for (I know I'm that way).
I think that plan/vision needs to say more specifics like: we're campaigning against all kinds of ads, especially ones that track you and hurt your privacy; we're abandoning 3rd party proprietary things built in to our browser; we're re-focusing on our needs on your security and privacy. We're going to have the most secure browser on the planet, implementing the following list of protocols and standards, we're researching some new protocols and standards and working with the community on them. We're going 64 bit on Windows to take full advantage of performance and security extensions in modern OSes. We're going to make crypto more easy and transparent, both TLS in the browser, but especially we're going to refocus our efforts on Thunderbird and making your email safe with built in idiot-proof PGP encryption and signing. We're also going to work with web vendors to start implementing their own encryption, meaning when you get a notice from your bank, we expect it to be signed by your bank's encryption key and it all happens automagically to keep you safe.
If I don't start seeing more concrete things like this working for the betterment of the internet and my security and privacy on the internet, then my donation dollars will start looking for other projects. I want to know you're working for me, and not using me only to generate money.
The Mozilla Foundation should be renamed the "Google's Ward Off A DOJ Monopoly Investigation Foundation" these days.
Only if you look at its most recent annual report, I think you'll find that 90 percent of its money comes from Yahoo now.
Breakfast served all day!
Except the mythical man month proved that wrong. What if they put all their resources on goal X, but X isn't what you want?
I argue for thunderbird and a few, focused other programs, to keep their mindset nimble and let good ideas spread internally.