Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client 378
Posted
by
timothy
from the sometimes-it-hits-the-fan dept.
from the sometimes-it-hits-the-fan dept.
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.
Probably won't hurt anything......for now (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They might as well kick all the developers. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Firefox is the least ram hungry browser [tomshardware.com] available! Chrome and even IE 9 last year kicked Firefox 4 ass in on a silver platter. However, the quality is considerable better for their browser at least.
I installed FF 3.6 on a machine to test something and it was PAINFUL and slow to scroll and ram and disk hungry. I was so used to it for so long I forgot about what made Chrome so special in 2009 - 2011 when people started using it.
I still feel comfortable using it and if Mozilla fixes just a few more things I may just switch back to using it.
Re:They might as well kick all the developers. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not so down on the Firefox team, but it seems like Firefox OS will have a tough climb. What's the benefit for a phone maker? Is it more open than Android? Is the HTML5 core going to make development for it easier?
Re:They might as well kick all the developers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox is officially trash now.
I beg to differ. I always have Firefox *and* Chrome open, but I spend most of my time in Firefox. 1) Firefox can scroll tabs. 2) Firefox will open a pdf or other document just by clicking on it. Chrome insists on downloading it and littering my Downloads directory with things I don't want to keep, besides requiring an extra step to open. 3) I use a Firefox plugin to remove Google's evil link obfuscation, so I can open search results much faster and cut and paste links in a way that makes sense. Not to mention making my eyes hurt less.
Re:They might as well kick all the developers. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thunderbird is pretty good. There aren't many open-source graphical mail clients out there that work consistently across all platforms. It is a little over-built and quirky, like all of Firefox. But there isn't really an equivalent alternative, especially if you need a newsgroup client.
The main competition at this point is webmail. But for people who need a desktop platform, Thunderbird is an easy go-to option.
Re:Tunderbirds are NO! (Score:2, Interesting)
It gets even worse when you have to get at your imap servers over an ssh-forwarded port. Prior to auto-discovery it was pretty easy. Now it's hit-or-miss.
"Just works" (TM) is great when it does, or when you need to do something slightly unusual. Then it just gets in your way. That's the thing that bothers me most about people trying to make Linux "user friendly", because it can only ever be "mostly user friendly" and when they do that they usually also take away the hacker hooks.
Why I stopped using windows so often, too many magical things that happened automatically and me saying ........ noooooooooooo.... that's not what I wanted, but it was too late.
Re:Not a big problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha. Let's see, counting ... yep, I have seven different email accounts that I have to keep an eye on at least hourly, and a few more that I need to check less often. Gmail is just one of them. (No, forwarding them all to gmail is not an option.) I'm sure I'm going to maintain seven different web pages to dink around with each email - especially since most of the webmail clients don't do simple things like select and delete/move numerous emails at once, or drag and drop. Some webmail clients are truly horrendous (network solutions comes to mind)
Using TB I can move mail between accounts as well as between folders within accounts. I can use the same filters for mail coming in or going out on different accounts. And no ads, or tracking cookies, etc.
Re:Don't be crazy (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Tunderbirds are NO! (Score:5, Interesting)
What more is there for email?
Something more for Thunderbird is integrated instant messaging [mozilla.org]. I want unified email and instant messaging in one application so I'll have unified contacts and search. The number of instant messaging services supported by Thunderbird seems like it will be limited at first but that will improve with time and perhaps there will be add-ons available to support more services.
Re:Probably won't hurt anything......for now (Score:4, Interesting)
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....
Re:All Done? - But for Lightning (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Probably won't hurt anything......for now (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why webmail is bad. (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:I can't wait! (Score:4, Interesting)
My F5 key hasn't moved in years. Not sure about yours.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.