Thunderbird Will Phase Out Legacy Add-Ons, Will Support WebExtensions (bleepingcomputer.com) 171
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.
"but later decided to reinvigorate in 2016" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Concur (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikispaces.com] 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.
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When it comes to Thunderbird the need/use for plugins isn't really there, it works pretty well standalone.
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When it comes to Thunderbird the need/use for plugins isn't really there, it works pretty well standalone.
If use more than a handful of addresses, Virtual Identity is absolutely essential.
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Agreed. I have many e-mail addresses and Virtual Identity is an excellent tool for handling them all from a single account.
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When it comes to Thunderbird the need/use for plugins isn't really there, it works pretty well standalone.
True for me; I only use two add-ons in Thunderbird: CompactHeader and Disable "You".
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Plugins are needed for GPG. That's the only reason I have thunderbird installed.
Re: Concur (Score:2)
Unless you use adhoc aliases (Google it). Then you NEED an extension.
Example: suppose your email address is "foo@bar.net".
You use a unique address for each correspondent, like "foo-potentialspammer@bar.net" (or if you want to be REALLY clever, "foo-potentialspammer$xxxxxxxxxxxx@bar.net", where "xxxxxxxxxxxx" is a 63-bit base36-encoded signature that confirms YOU created the address).
Your mail server sees the "-", matches everything up to it to determine the mailbox, applies any user-defined rules to everyth
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It's unclear what you think of as "copying Google" in terms of paths Mozilla should not follow.
If you mean "make a fast browser" then you're wrong. For long-term survival, Mozilla absolutely needs Firefox to be as fast or faster than Chrome, and that is achievable, and has been partially achieved; many people have switched to Firefox 57 from Chrome because they feel Firefox is faster.
If you mean "secure the browser using content process sandboxing" then that's wrong too. Without that Firefox has been runnin
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This is wrong. And it's not just a wrong state to be in but it's indicative (indicting really) of the completely skewed thought chain leading up to that conclusion.
First of all, when is the last time your browser's rendering efficiency was the rate limiting step to how fast a page displayed for you? Browser speed for 99.9% of the user base is a metric that is only even relevant insomuch as it is published as a benc
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I'm not talking about page-load speed specifically. It's all about how people perceive the performance of the browser. A lot of people switch browsers in response to that, from Firefox to Chrome, and lately from Chrome to Firefox.
Your speculation about Mozilla's goal-setting is wrong. Success is simple: get more people using Firefox, which means making Firefox superior to the competition in the ways most people care about. Those things don't change much over time: performance, Web sites working properly, ma
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If Firefox was producing something that was actually better than Chrome, I might agree. But they're not. They're producing Chrome.
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I think every point you've made here is either weak or incorrect, especially about the development model.
Rolling release is a pox on the industry.
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Actually, it was 2011 when they adopted Google's rapid release and versioning methodology
I don't have enough information to know if this was the cause, or if the two shared a mutual cause, but the timing certainly is suspicious.
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+1,000,000...
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I guess more to the point.
1. What are the better alternative to Thunderbird
2. What features do people really want and what they don't
I am willing to bet when you ask these features, you might realize it is impossible to make a perfect client, unless you make one for yourself.
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Despite all the moans and bitches by text-mode purist (who need to accept the fact that the "we must use text to save bandwidth!" argument died a decade ago), I like Outlook because it handles tables (pasting spreadsheet segments) and text formatting (using RTF) really well. Much better than T-bird. I never use it's calendar for my own needs, but it's great for scheduling meetings.
I don't know how it handles IMAP or multiple accounts (which T-bird does well), since I only use it on my work laptop, integr
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The option should be there for old-school mailing lists.
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Every point release in the past two years has reduced functionality.
What functionality has been reduced?
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Small things like table handling. (Paste a section of spreadsheet into T-bird, and all the fonts go tiny. Before around 51.0, you could type Ctrl-End, and they'd be restored.)
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Our use-cases might be different, as might our definitions of "fine".
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This is /., not a bug report.
Mission Statement (Score:1)
"To crater market share of Thunderbird in similar fashion as Firefox."
hope they dont ruin it, good for 10+ years (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
I suspect that they will though. The nannies at Mozilla need to get their fingers on everything.
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I'm not sure what features there really are to add to a simple IMAP/POP client.
And that's the thing, I really think that a project like Thunderbird should pick a lane and stick in it. Do you want to be a IMAP/POP client? Cool. Be that. Keep it simple, and make it robust, secure, and fast.
Or else, be ambitious and try to be Outlook. That's fine. You can be a groupware client. But that also needs a server side to be really practical. You can't just perpetually dump half-assed features into the clien
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I'm not sure what features there really are to add to a simple IMAP/POP client.
Another calendar. A Task / event manager (which is the same thing). A social media integrator. Another chat client that requires you to log in and complains when you don't. An activity manager. A developer toolbox. An pseudo-AI emoji insertion tool that forces the damn things into your messages and which takes half an hour figure out how to turn off. A whole bunch of things that should be optional but which are now built in, take up screen or menu real estate and which you never use.
What they won't include
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Hear, hear. My list of Thunderbird desirables WITHOUT extensions:
+ Export/import Thunderbird settings (accounts, layouts, etc.)
+ To/From/CC/BCC columns (currently in ColumnsWizard extension)
+ Auto-archive (currently in deprecated Awesome Auto Archive extension)
+ Read-only stand-alone (not in profile) MBOX files
+ Read PST files (currently by third party apps)
+ One-click HTML-plain text email reading
+ One-click HTML-plain text email authoring
+ Multiple signatures
+ Better lock file stability for real-time sync
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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You say that, but those people have done nothing to help their products remain relevant
Baloney. I admit, I stopped promoting Firefox and communicating to Mozilla about it about five or six years ago. But that's because Mozilla stopped giving a shit and were determined to ensure that each successive release of Firefox was a little worse than the one that came before.
That's not "doing nothing to help the product remain relevant". That's an organization deciding that they don't want the likes of me as a customer anymore.
"adding a new user interface" (Score:5, Insightful)
This scares me.
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This scares me.
They'll probably decide what mail you are or aren't allowed to see, just like Firefox does now. Which I've uninstalled from my machine. I don't need a nanny.
Re: "adding a new user interface" (Score:5, Insightful)
No shit. When was the last time that a new UI actually improved a product? Pro tip to UIX folk: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Less's Law (Score:2)
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.
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No shit. When was the last time that a new UI actually improved a product? Pro tip to UIX folk: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
As much as I worry the update will be worse, the current UI is pretty hateful. Take "Message Filters" for example... it is *really* not a well designed interface.
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True, the current Thunderbird UI is pretty bad. My fear is that the new one will be worse.
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Re:"adding a new user interface" (Score:4, Informative)
Your fears are totally warranted as the new UI looks like modern [netdna-ssl.com] shit [ghacks.net] we are already forced to consume in other OS'es like Windows 10.
Hopefully the new Thunderbird will be themeable but I wouldn't hold my breath considering that theming was essentially killed in Firefox (we can only apply a background image to its bars - that's it).
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Your fears are totally warranted
Meh. Doesn't look much different to the current UI. His fears are overblown.
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It should. The odds are excellent that the new UI will be like the new Firefox UI.
Is Google Pressuring Mozilla to Stop Thunderbid? (Score:2)
"Photon UI?" WTF, it has a Name!? (Score:1)
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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 recreat
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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.
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>> 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*
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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
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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.
My Add-ons (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't mind if some add-ons were integrated (Enigmail, Nostalgy) but don't mess too much with the cored T-Bird.
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The program (at least WRT plugins) would have been much better off if it had been kicked out from underneath Mozilla senior executive "good decisions".
Re:My Add-ons (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why the hell aren't all of you doing something about it? Fork the damn product now. I'm sure you're all ten times more competent than Mozilla here on Slashdot, based on what you're all saying. But something tells me all of this high and mighty talk is just the usual calculated excuse to not do anything and be able to blame someone else when things inevitably go badly for the product you use and "love".
Ah, the actual problem, illustrated beautifully: developers/coders don't know how to listen to end-users. They may know how to write code, but their listening skills are almost non-existent. Is it because they live in a bubble, surrounded by other coders? Is it because their skillset just doesn't extend in that direction? Is it because they're guided by priorities (revenue?) other than what their users want/need?
Telling end-users to write code is asinine. You don't hear chefs telling restaurant critics to cook something better their own damn self. You don't see film directors telling movie critics to create their own movie. And you don't see book authors telling book reviewers to write their own novel. But every single time this comes up, you'll see some code writer (or defender of same) pipe up with the advice that if users don't like it, that they're free to fork the project and write their own software. Absolutely ridiculous.
Thunderbird doesn't work (Score:3, Informative)
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.
What do you use instead for lots of email? (Score:2)
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.
Re: What do you use instead for lots of email? (Score:4, Interesting)
I moved everything to GMail.
Not ideal, but it can deal with the data, and has other advantages to.
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Thanks. For myself, I just could not see handing over all my correspondence to Google -- although of course they probably have most of it considering how many people anyone corresponds with these days use gmail.
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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?
This can't be good... (Score:1)
...adding a new user interface
Mozilla has shown their ignorance regarding the UI that the users want. Combine that with Mozilla being too arrogant to learn from their mistakes. A UI change cannot be a change for the better.
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Palemoon community (Score:2)
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Now needs to fork Thunderbird. We could call it Palehorse since it still uses Native American labeling and horses were used for mail delivery.
There was one: FossaMail [fossamail.org] but it looks like it was discontinued.
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Great communication, guys (Score:4, Insightful)
"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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I can't find a language spec for "web technologies"
In the context of browser extensions, the relevant specs are ECMA-262 [ecma-international.org], CSS [w3.org], HTML Living Standard [whatwg.org], and WebExtensions API [mozilla.org].
Thanks (Score:2)
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.
Now for some credit where I feel it due... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Is it fork time? (Score:2)
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?
Will stop updates then (Score:1)
FUCK (Score:3)
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.
I'm lucky (Score:2)
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.
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Except that I'm not lucky in that they're changing the UI. If the changes resemble the changes made for Firefox, that will be a bitter pill to swallow.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re: Mozilla is a bunch of shitbag SJWs!!! (Score:1)
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Well, except that then you'd have to use Outlook.