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Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client 378

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.
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Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client

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  • by ClassicASP ( 1791116 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @06:45PM (#40571231)
    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.
    • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Yeah I've been using it for years as well. I've yet to find something not quite as annoying, though I've never really looked for options. Despite what the /. crowd thinks, it is popular with the non-teksavy crowd, at least those who got tired of MS and their OLE replacements.

      • by Fjandr ( 66656 )

        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.

        It's actually unfortunate that there's not a binary compiled version of RoundCube, because it has a reasonably usable interface for a web client.

        • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          Sounds to me like there's a good FOSS project in the making then.

        • by JDG1980 ( 2438906 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @09:36PM (#40572641)

          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.

          • by grcumb ( 781340 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @09:52PM (#40572763) Homepage Journal

            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.

            I download my mail and keep a copy on the server. That way -in theory, at least- I can index and search my 3+ GB of mail in real time, across multiple accounts.

            That said, I agree with many posters here that Thunderbird is the least worst email client out there now. Its search has gotten worse in the last couple of versions, and it just loses the plot sometimes when trying to connect and sync with multiple IMAP accounts on a flaky Internet connection (which, tragically, is the only kind we have in my country). It's prone to weird behaviour that causes significant CPU load and all too often renders it so unresponsive that only a kill -9 will put me out of its misery.

            BUT... Outlook gives me hives and, while Eudora was once a genuinely nice app, it's fallen by the wayside. It's almost enough to make me go back to mutt, if they've resolved their clunky approach to multiple accounts, that is....

            • Few people seem to be aware of it, but Opera has a very nice built-in email client, and you don't have to use it as a browser - just reconfigure the UI to hide all tabs, and dock the email folder window by default. It's cross-platform, too.

          • by Fjandr ( 66656 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @10:18PM (#40572921) Homepage Journal

            In my case, I do host my own email, and (without getting deeply into the reasons why) a stand-alone client allows for moving and syncing mail across multiple accounts. Rather than doing a mass forward which screws up the dating and place in a message thread, I just move the original thread to another account in its entirety. I could probably write a script to search and move them remotely, but I don't know enough about the file formats and have no other reason to delve into the issue.

            I like the cloud capabilities for syncing and remotely accessing messages, but I also want the ability to have and use a local copy of all those messages.

          • by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Saturday July 07, 2012 @12:34AM (#40573513)

            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.

            There are several things.

            #1 I like really advanced complex features like having multiple messages open simultaneously, the average web interface either doesn't support this or does it poorly.

            #2 I already have half a dozen browser windows and tabs open if not more. I -like- my email windows have a different title bar, a different icon in the task bar, etc. Having everything open via the web browser makes making sense of my open windows more of a hassle. Plus if i quit the mail program, all the mail windows close. Nice.

            #3 Hotkeys - yes some web interfaces have them, but its a mess.

            #4 Attachment handling - web clients are getting better but it still sucks, and its far worse if your internet connection is ever less than perfect.

            #5 Mass message handling... most web clients let you handle a page of email at a time.

            #6 Folders - yeah yeah... gmail has tags and they aren't bad either, but like being able to expand and collapse folders within folders within folders.

            On the subject of tags ...here's an interesting problem... migrate all your tagged mail from one gmail account to another one. This is painful as hell. I'm speaking as a Google Apps for Enterprises user here too... the paid version with phone support...

            Only way to do is via IMAP,... which treats tags as folders. So if you've got someone with 5GB of email who is really got into tagging, and every message is tagged 3 or 4 different ways, IMAP sees it as 40GB of email. Now fortunately google and imap are smart enough to check message IDs and as each "tag" item is downloaded via imap as a folder, and then pushed into the new account folder where gmail converts it back to a tagged item it doesn't create duplicates of the message which is great. But it does still have to process them all as if they were separate messages.

            Two small companies merged and two separate gmail accounts had to be consolidated...it took days. There was NO backend tool to do it "within the cloud", nope... every account had to be downloaded to a local workstation via IMAP and then pushed back up to the other account via imap... and every tagged item had to be evaluated separately for every tag on it...

            Google provides a "legacy mail migration tool" to allow new clients to migrate data from your old email system to the new one via IMAP... and this is the same tool you need to use to move mailboxes between two different gmail hosted domains... or to move mail from one mailbox to another one in general (e.g. when an employee quits... although I think there postini stuff comes into play here too... I haven't gotten that deep into it...)

  • Good. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zadaz ( 950521 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @06:53PM (#40571289)

    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.

    • Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by D'Sphitz ( 699604 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @11:59PM (#40573363) Journal

      There is eventually a point where it's good enough and adding anything to it would detract.

      They don't need to add new fluff to improve it, there is plenty there already that desperately needs to be improved. Just a couple of examples that immediately come to mind:

      - Message tags have potential to be extremely useful, in their current implementation they don't do much other than color code your message. The dialog for managing the tags themselves was an afterthought, there is no way to re-order without directly editing the config, no way to assign hotkeys, no way to customize font styles other than choosing from a tiny fixed color palette.

      - Rich text (html) editing is painful. You are always one keystroke away from changing your entire paragraph to the style of an adjacent paragraph. You can't define custom formats, or even edit the default formats. Even the "use last-picked color" convenience option in the color picker requires the same number of clicks as picking a new color.

      - Editing the message source directly is another poorly designed dialog, it shouldn't be a dialog at all.

      - The address book and contact management is another embarrassing afterthought, one area where you'd expect an email client to excel.

      - Getting a consistent folder view is tedious, the "apply columns to..." tool doesn't work well and ignores saved searches altogether.

      - Bugs in the account configuration have persisted for years.

      - Some things open in tabs, others open in a new window.

      I guess now that they've officially given up, I can start looking for alternatives instead of thinking they will ever fix these things.

      • Editing the message source directly is another poorly designed dialog, it shouldn't be a dialog at all

        This sounds tremendously useful, but I can't find any way to edit the message source at all. All I see is the "View source" menu item (or Ctrl+U shortcut), which gives me a read-only view of the source. Can you please explain how you get to a source editor?

  • 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

  • Other options? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @06:55PM (#40571305) Journal

    I don't like Thunderbird (hilarious bugs like this one [mozilla.org] 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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm using "Mutt".

    • Re:Other options? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:15PM (#40571513)

      You hit the biggest problem with Open Source -- the dev's just don't understand the importance of UI.

      11 years to fix a 5-min patch. Sad, really.

    • What other clients are people using on windows?

      You can try Eudora if you want wallow in some "used to be great".

      • Re:Other options? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by msauve ( 701917 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:37PM (#40571697)
        Eudora still works pretty well. And it would be great, if Mozilla had simply spent resources on updating it, instead of ripping it down to the frame and rebuilding it as TBird, then trying to get it back as Penelope/Eudora OSE. None of those were even close to as good as Eudora, especially in UI. When I finally switched to TBird, it simply couldn't do what Eudora could, especially with filtering, which forced me to learn and use server side procmail.
        • by Wordplay ( 54438 )

          The chronology here seems odd. Thunderbird certainly was not a torn-down/rebuilt Eudora. Qualcomm owns Eudora, and in '06 they switched it over to the same platform as (the already existing) Thunderbird.

          https://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope [mozilla.org]

          The project is laid out on Mozilla's wiki, and I believe is considered a community project, but you'll notice all the drivers are Qualcomm people.

    • by mrmeval ( 662166 )

      Yea that one where the devs slam "wontfix" on it and it gets perpetually reopened. Since mozilla is going the way of ms/ubuntu/gnome and that bug caters to MS why am I not surprised.

    • In Ex-USSR The Bat [ritlabs.com] is quite popular.

      My friend used for many years the Foxmail [foxmail.com.cn] (but from the first glance I do not see where the English version is).

      There are also of course Opera [opera.com] and Pegasus [pmail.com].

      I have personally went through: Netscape Messenger/Tb, The Bat, Pegasus and Opera. But I have used them very very long time ago and can't attest to what they have developed into this days. Of all, I have used Netscape 4.x for the longest time and it was probably the best. Tb screw up many different things on w

    • Opera has a very decent integrated email & NNTP client [opera.com]. Some highlights include good support on offline mode, GMail-style labels, and very fast search. If you already have a browser you like (most likely), you can ignore the browser part of this altogether - if you launch it as "opera mail", it starts up in email view by default, and the UI is customizable so you can get rid of all unnecessary widgets.

  • Not a big problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @06:55PM (#40571307)

    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.

    • by DirePickle ( 796986 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @08:30PM (#40572115)
      For me, I've never used webmail service that was even remotely as fast as even a big clunky client like Thunderbird. Gmail and MS Live Mail or whatever they call it are absolutely terrible to use from a browser! Ugh, javascript monstrosities!
    • by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @08:31PM (#40572129)

      The only reason I even use outlook is not for its email client, its all the other shit that it also does, none of which thunderbird does and thus I never use it

  • Don't be crazy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @06:57PM (#40571329)

    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.

    • by theurge14 ( 820596 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:31PM (#40571647)

      Hey now, Creepy Cloud is my exotic dancer stage name.

    • Re:Don't be crazy (Score:5, Informative)

      by toygeek ( 473120 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:43PM (#40571753) Journal

      By removing Outlook Express, they did the world a favor. What a gigantic piece of crap that was. Getting double mails for no good reason? Remove and reinstall the offending account. Lost all your mail? Well, don't clear your recycle bin any time soon, or its probably gone forever. Just quit working altogether? That's normal for OE.

      I worked for a small web hosting company during the time that OE was en vogue. Don't tell me about "lost functionality". That thing was and still is a huge piece of crap.

      Did I mention it was a piece of crap?

      It was a piece of crap.

      • Re:Don't be crazy (Score:4, Interesting)

        by garyebickford ( 222422 ) <gar37bic@@@gmail...com> on Friday July 06, 2012 @09:03PM (#40572389)

        By removing Outlook Express, they did the world a favor. What a gigantic piece of crap that was.

        Indeed. In 1999 the Global 1000 company I worked for banned Outlook Express from the company after spending $5 MILLION on support and lost time by users, mostly dealing with malware that was tied to OE. To this day they do not use Exchange either.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:05PM (#40571407)

    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.

  • by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:15PM (#40571511) Homepage

    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.

    • They get $300 mil per year from Google!

      They should spend $100 million, and bank the rest instead of wasting all on dumb stuff like FF OS, or redesigning FF and a new version every two months.

      Then, with the interest of the banked amount, work on projects that don't have a business model.

      You know, because they're supposed to be a non-profit.

  • by charlesr44403 ( 1504587 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:22PM (#40571573)
    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.
  • by bmo ( 77928 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:42PM (#40571725)

    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

    • by msauve ( 701917 )
      POP3 > IMAP
    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Very good (and interesting) point you make, which I suspect most people aren't even aware of.

      BUT, I'd also say that practically-speaking, I'm not sure how big a concern this really is for most folks? If law enforcement is interested enough in your mail content to get a subpoena to download/view it, there's a REALLY good chance that in today's legal climate, they'd have absolutely no problem getting a warrant for it either.

      If you have concerns the law might look in on some "sensitive" email content, you real

    • This is why we need to make email encryption more popular. Thunderbird is one of the best with its enigmail PGP/GPG plugin.

    • by BlakJak-ZL1VMF ( 256320 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @11:36PM (#40573243) Homepage

      And as a non American, I support the above. My email archive goes back to the days prior to Gmail, prior to my current email address, infact even prior to using Thunderbird (it's been in Eudora, Netscape Communicator, Mozilla Suite, and Thunderbird variously over the years).

      I keep the last month or so's email live on my mail server and read it with IMAP. From Thunderbird. On a half dozen different machines. Windows and Linux. All Thunderbird.

      Every month or so I use POP3 to pull all the email server-side down to my archive installation of Thunderbird on my home server.

      I refer to my archive about every month or two at minimum, and have already found value in being able to pull transactional email notifications from 2 years ago out of an archived folder, to help rebuild a mailing list that was hosted in the cloud (but where said cloud service provider decided to be nasty and delete an entire VM, plus backups, simply because they could, and not because it was reasonable).

      My email archive is mine, it's on hardware I control, backed up by my own backup regime, sitting in property I control and subject to local jursidiction. My live mail platform is one I personally administer, that I can read from the several computers I use week-to-week using exactly the same software (Thunderbird).

      I'm glad to hear Thunderbird will still have 'some' attention, though I hope the writing isn't on the wall. We need Thunderbird. My entire corporate office uses Thunderbird + Lightning (Mac and Linux clients) to talk to our POP/IMAP platform and soon, to talk to Zimbra. Zimbra might be a powerful web based app but it's still nice to be able to carry out work when you're disconnected!

  • 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

    • by sr180 ( 700526 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @09:53PM (#40572767) Journal

      Lightning is full of bugs. Its been getting better over the years - but its so far behind Outlook and Exchange. Its a pity, because a little work with this, and it could be a very good Outlook/Exchange replacement. Cyrus-IMap is a better mail server than Exchange in every way, and the remnants of Netscape Calendar (now with Oracle) is a better calendar server in every way - its just the clients suck.

      These are some wishes from semi-enterprise...
      Mail:
      1. No auto-configuration. Why should users have to configure mail servers - configure it through DNS srv records. (Dont get me started on the current mail configuration - theres plenty of rants here already.) If the srv records are there, it knows all of the account details, just provide a username and password and thunderbird is configured.
      2. The text editor is only a minor improvement from the original netscape (and in some ways that was better.) Have a look at MCE editor for ideas on providing a better editor (and its already in javascript for easy porting)
      3. Plugin deployment is difficult.

      Calendar:
      1. No auto-configuration. Using Caldav means adding a horrible url for each calendar you want.
      2. No way of administering these calendars. - Delete, rename etc. I can add new ones, by crafting a new url.... https://caldav.example.com:8080/caldav.php/username/NewCalendar [example.com]
      3. No adding of modifying permissions on calendars.
      4. No listing available calendars from the server. I should simply be able to list my own calendars that are on the server - and list ones available from other users, and resources.
      5. Invites are still spotty.
      6. Theres very little insight to when it goes wrong. no meaningful error messages - stuff just doesnt work.

      Sogo is addressing some of these things, however, this should all be included functionality - core to lightning.

      It really highlights some of the issues - calendars are hard, and because its a plugin - its in javascript - and thats damn hard too.
      But its annoying, because its so close to being a great enterprise product.

  • by slasho81 ( 455509 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @08:59PM (#40572361)

    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.

    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.

    • by Raenex ( 947668 )

      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.

      Bullshit. You do realize how "news" operates? It doesn't wait around for official announcements when there's a leak beforehand. And the nice thing about this leak is we get to see the internal memo, which is already plenty sanitized, before the even further sanitized announcement.

    • by Cow Jones ( 615566 ) on Saturday July 07, 2012 @06:55AM (#40574741)

      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:

      And a more broadly focused post script that won't necessarily make sense to those outside Mozilla (or even a good chunk of those within): The fact that this message was marked "confidential" is part of a deeply, deeply troubling trend. The biggest irony? Uninitiated employees--those being discussed in .governance right now, and who feel that there's actually quite a lot at Mozilla that shouldn't happen in the public--will point to this incident to try to make their point, in a tremendous display of Not Fucking Getting It. Let's rewind a year or three, MoCo.

      CJ

  • 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.

  • Downhill (Score:5, Insightful)

    by damicatz ( 711271 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @09:21PM (#40572505)

    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).

    • Anybody remember when UI was was UI? (User interface)

      If you want a quick gauge of the pretentiousness of a project, just check if the UI is called "user experience". What are they, selling perfume at Nordstrom's?

      The average 15" laptop is 1366x768.

      With 25 (!) people, each could be responsible for a 54x31 block, barely bigger than a large icon. Talk about bloat.

      And they can't spare 5 people to continue with Thunderbird work? How about a simple thing like Assign Tasks? Languishing for years.

    • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      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.

      Oh boy, do I agree with you.

  • :headdesk: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Friday July 06, 2012 @10:34PM (#40572997) Homepage Journal

    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?

  • by cas2000 ( 148703 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @10:49PM (#40573047)

    (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!

  • by casings ( 257363 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @11:07PM (#40573123)

    E.g. not i.e.!!

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills. -- Ambrose Bierce

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