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Thunderbird Will Phase Out Legacy Add-Ons, Will Support WebExtensions (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Mozilla announced last week plans to modernize Thunderbird's codebase, plans that include fixing some "technical debt" by incorporating the recent changes in the Mozilla engine into Thunderbird, adding a new user interface (UI), and phasing out old legacy add-ons that are built on the XUL and XPCOM APIs. The changes are part of Mozilla's new plan for Thunderbird development, a project that it left for dead in 2012, but later decided to reinvigorate in 2016.
Hah. Every point release in the past two years has reduced functionality. If there were a reasonable (Claws isn't) Linux substitute, then I'd switch in a minute.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"To crater market share of Thunderbird in similar fashion as Firefox."
I've been using it for 10+ years and appreciate the lack of needless feature churning and meaningless version bumping, it's a mature product. Hope the morons jerking their browser around don't fuck it up.
Well, are they going to roll EWS support into their main codebase (currently functional through a plugin)? It's almost like they strongly desire these products to die. They seem to have forgetten that the market they need to be directly pandering to isn't necessarily their bulk consumer base... it's the people that recommend/support (tense is probably wrong at this point) the use of their products.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
This scares me.
Something is not right here.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
It was better when it was left for dead. At least then it was left alone. Everything that Mozilla has touched since 2012 has turned to ashes. Actually, it was 2011 when they adopted Google's rapid release and versioning methodology on a project that it was neither technically nor culturally suited for. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Now they are set to do it again with Thunderbird. They are just hell bent on shedding any technical merit or usability they have in favour of cramming UI changes and
The've been doing this since 2011. Mozilla has been quite content to shed any technical merit they had for almost any reason at all. It all started when they saw Chrome beginning to become successful, and immediately decided to emulate Google's development environment. They adopted Google's rapid release and versioning method on a project that was neither technically nor culturally suited for it. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Then they went all hell bent on adopting major UI changes that were demonstrably unpopular by the majority of its user base. And if alienating the extensions authors wasn't enough, many of the UI changes destroyed themes on back-to-back-to-back releases. It reminds me of one of my country's more famous (and intensely divisive) prime ministers who, when he realized he'd alienated half my country, proceeded to give them the finger from his seat on a train as he was passing through their area. That's Mozilla. They go out of their way to alienate users, and then the ones who have stayed loyal they give the finger to with decisions like this.
All of this was in an attempt at emulating Chrome's burgeoning success. The problem is, they never figured out... you simply cannot surpass someone else by playing copycat on their methods. This is important so I'm going to say it again. Mozilla cannot copy Google and be better than Google. All they did with Firefox was alienate their existing user base in favour of a product that could never be quite as good at being Chrome as Chrome was. And now they are running headlong into inevitability again. See here for details.
The PaleMoon project has done for the browser what Mozilla should have done. It was originally a patch on an earlier FF ESR, they have since essentially departed from Firefox, though they still borrow some bits when it makes sense to do so. It's what Firefox should have been if they hadn't taken the detour into crazy six years ago. Maybe they can be convinced to do the same for Thunderbird.
They're just trying to keep up with everyone else!
To be more specific, the Mozilla team based their UI ideas on Chrome, GNOME 3, Windows 8, and other studies in bad user interface design, it's more of a conclusions of a set of studies in bad user interface design than a study in bad user interface design.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I wouldn't mind if some add-ons were integrated (Enigmail, Nostalgy) but don't mess too much with the cored T-Bird.
Actually the "new UI" looks just like the old one but with the Photon design elements latched on. Doesn't look really different.
I do have to say, it could have been worse for the Firefox UI (I definitely prefer the old UI) - but you're right, they took Firefox right out to the Windows Phone / Windows 8 / Windows 10 woodshed and did a job on it.
Doing this with Thunderbird makes little sense - except from the ivory tower view of trying to maintain a single code base (except I doubt this will save them much money) cause most of those plugin authors (a good chunk of which is for encyption) are barely alive and not wanting to recreate their plugins.
Maybe Mozilla management, after its fresh privacy and user respect victory of rolling out a unannounced Mr. Robot / E Corp marketing campaign plugin into Firefox (if you had "..allow studies" checked in privacy...studies doesn't sound like marketing does it - very Facebook doublespeak there) - is ready to move on to the stubborn Thunderbird user base who keep using the e-mail client (myself included).
I stopped using Thunderbird ages ago when they started incorporating sqlite and smart search. It made it completely unable to cope with the amount of emails I have.
It's like they don't understand some people have dozens of gigs of plain text email and are subscribed to a hundred high-volume NNTP groups.
Now needs to fork Thunderbird. We could call it Palehorse since it still uses Native American labeling and horses were used for mail delivery.
The only ThunderBird extension I use is also Lightning. But I'm one of those who wouldn't touch any software from MS.
So.... has kmail gotten any better? Last time I tried it, it crashed after a couple of months, apparently from an overloaded mail box. That *was* a few years ago, however.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Troll? Have the Mozilla fanbois taken over the site? I expressed an opinion about Mozilla, and it's a troll? 'Tis a shame Mozilla has become so thin-skinned that they need to be held in adulation, and cannot handle even mild criticism.
"Mozilla engineers have already started work on adding support for WebExtensions in Thunderbird, albeit there's no concrete deadline when this feature will land in a stable release, nor when Thunderbird will stop supporting legacy add-ons."
Adding to this, they will shift away from C++/Javascript/XUL to "web technologies". Now I can't find a language spec for "web technologies", so it sounds like neither one of us knows exactly where they're headed.
Taking all of this into consideration, their press release boils down to: We don't know what we're doing or when, but it's going to be great.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
That's why I keep coming to /., even when the quality of the articles keep going down. It's not very verbose and you get the important alerts.
This alert has allowed me to disable automatic updates in Thunderbird, because apparently some people cannot left good enough alone.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
It is entirely feasible, that within a matter of a few short years, the entire Internet will become completely unusable.
Based on the current rate of progress, sometimes described as Less's Law, I would say it gets about 1/2 as useful every 18 months.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
... to a possibly surprising recipient: Despite being a crusty/unreliable piece of crap, Outlook has no shortage of features, and exposes them in not-particularly-difficult-to-find ways. The UI is probably the least 'afflicted' by the ribbon of the various Office products I've used in recent history, as the ribbon winds up getting used more like a conventional menu. While we are not expecting Thunderbird to be a full-featured Outlook knock-off, the current set of features (while missing a few) is still quite good; any reduction thereof means they're taking a step back, and no longer see themselves as a viable competitor to the old behemoth (regardless of if it is true or not.
Closing statements, directed towards The Mozilla Foundation:
I will continue to use Thunderbird, even older versions, until it becomes a security liability and/or no longer does what I need it to do.
I will have little choice but to return to Outlook for work purposes, if WebExtensions is to be ramrodded down our collective gullets.
Thunderbird may very well be your last opportunity to prove to the world that you have not completely lost your way; don't blow it.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
This sounds like they are about to start the mindless updating for the sake of updating that has ruined Firefox. Can some other group be persuaded to fork the current Thunderbird? Wouldn't an integrated email client be a good addition to the Libre Office suite, for example?
Just curious... I want to build better tools myself for that use case, but maybe something better is out there already?
BTW, you can also turn off some of the indexing functionality in TB -- I think I had to do that myself a few years ago for performance reasons.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Postfix doesn't do POP or IMAP. It doesn't do a lot it doesn't need to do to send and receive SMTP, though, not sure how much more minimal you want. OpenSMTPD, maybe?
Is the manual for this application posted online? I searched Google for "apk hosts file engine" manual (and documentation) but didn't see anything relevant.
I had to abandon Kmail, the update to work with KDE 5 made it not work at all. I abandoned KDE completely, in fact.
I've been using Evolution for 6 months, it's not as good as Kmail used to be, but it's the next best thing.
Basilisk, Pale Moon and Waterfox is preserving XUL in the browser
Only in the short term. They're all dependent on Firefox's upstream development so in the long term they'll become like Firefox is now or they'll stagnate and die.
Thunderbird works great in our small office. The only extension we use that is critical is InsertLinkToLocalFile. The chances of that getting re-written are zero, unless I do it and I won't. We have separate accounts for inter-office emails where we can share links to client folders and keep track of the emails as threads.
Email is a mature technology. Thunderbird does not need a new UI. It does not need changes to keep up with email technology.
I concur. What they do need changes for is to demonstrate that the coders are earning their pay. This is what has forced the Australian government's Centrelink website to evolve into the hideous, bloated, creeping-featuritis-ised animated icon jangling ipad-optimised pachinko parlor of a video game, rather than, you know, a government website. It looks like it was designed by eight-year-olds on a sugar high.
So they're basically going to mutilate the UI, hide the menus and replace that with meaningless icons and hard to find settings that take more clicks to get to. What the hell is it with these fucking morons, they're everywhere fucking up UIs, changing them from meaningful words that name the actions they fulfill to stupidly laid out icons in fucking weird places and layouts where you can't discern where one section begins and another ends. Because progress, because some fucking idiots think everything has to look new all the time, can we create a fucking virus to wipe out these fucking brainless sheeple, the planet is overpopulated anyhow. /rant over... for now.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
What happened to phasing out Thunderbird?
I was able to get FireTray (assuming you want an unread count in your system tray) working by changing the supported version flag in the .xpi file (which is just a ZIP file).
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
For clarity, one must edit install.rdf and change the 38.0 to some much higher number.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Although I have depended heavily on Thunderbird for many years, I only use it as an email reader, and I only read emails in plain text.
So, as sad (and unexpected) as it is to see this shift to WebExtensions, at least I am escaping unscathed from this particular change. If you don't use extensions, the change is irrelevant to you.
This is a world of difference from when they did it to Firefox, which has ended up meaning that I have to use a fork.
So.... has kmail gotten any better? Last time I tried it, it crashed after a couple of months
You managed to make it work right for a couple of months??
That beats my record.
Well, except that then you'd have to use Outlook.
>> Basilisk, Pale Moon and Waterfox is preserving XUL in the browser
> Only in the short term. They're all dependent on Firefox's upstream development
> so in the long term they'll become like Firefox is now or they'll stagnate and die.
I can't mod down and post in the same story, so I chose to to reply Why do you think Pale Moon depends on Firefox? Pale Moon says they are not now and never will be Firefox again. They did not follow with the Australis GUI or Hello or Webextensions. By merely *NOT* following Firefox, Pale Moon is pulling away from Firefox... which is quite sad.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Why do you think Pale Moon depends on Firefox?
Basilisk, Pale Moon, and WaterFox all depend on Firefox because their development teams are far too small to keep up the development of a fully-fledged browser. They're going to have to rebase on the latest Firefox code eventually. No doing so will mean the browsers stagnate and fall even further behind.
Additionally, the XUL based add-ons will need developers to maintain them. No one is going to be interested in doing that in the long term because the user base is too small. NoScript is a good example of this. Giorgio Maone has committed to maintaining the old XUL based version of NoScript until June, 2018 after which he'll just focus on the current WebExtensions version.