Firefox and Thunderbird: A Fork in the Road

jeremy · 04-26-2016, 09:44 AM

Quote:

Firefox and Thunderbird have reached a fork in the road: it’s now the right time for them to part ways on both a technical and organizational level.

In line with the process we started in 2012, today we’re taking another step towards the independence of Thunderbird. We’re posting a report authored by open source leader Simon Phipps that explores options for a future organizational home for Thunderbird. We’ve also started the process of helping the Thunderbird Council chart a course forward for Thunderbird’s future technical direction, by posting a job specification for a technical architect.

In this post, I want to take the time to go over the origins of Thunderbird and Firefox, the process for Thunderbird’s independence and update you on where we are taking this next. For those close to Mozilla, both the setting and the current process may already be clear. For those who haven’t been following the process, I wanted to write a longer post with all the context. If you are interested in that context, read on.

Summary

Much of Mozilla, including the leadership team, believes that focusing on the web through Firefox offers a vastly better chance of moving the Internet industry to a more open place than investing further in Thunderbird—or continuing to attend to both products.

Many of us remain committed Thunderbird users and want to see Thunderbird remain a healthy community and product. But both Firefox and Thunderbird face different challenges, have different goals and different measures of success. Our actions regarding Thunderbird should be viewed in this light.

Success for Firefox means continued relevance in the mass consumer market as a way for people to access, shape and feel safe across many devices. With hundreds of millions of users on both desktop and mobile, we have the raw material for this success. However, if we want Firefox to continue to have an impact on how developers and consumers interact with the Internet, we need to move much more quickly to innovate on mobile and in the cloud. Mozilla is putting the majority of its human and financial resources into Firefox product innovation.

In contrast, success for Thunderbird means remaining a reliable and stable open source desktop email client. While many people still value the security and independence that come with desktop email (I am one of them), the overall number of such people in the world is shrinking. In 2012, around when desktop email first became the exception rather than the rule, Mozilla started to reduce its investment and transitioned Thunderbird into a fully volunteer-run open source project.

Given these different paths, it should be no surprise that tensions have arisen as we’ve tried to maintain Firefox and Thunderbird on top of a common underlying code base and common release engineering system. In December, we started a process to deal with those release engineering issues, and also to find a long-term organizational home for Thunderbird.

Initial Post...

What do LQ members think?

--jeremy

cwizardone · 04-26-2016, 11:42 AM

The first question that comes to mind is, what will happen to the SeaMonkey project?

sgosnell · 04-26-2016, 05:31 PM

AFAIK SeaMonkey is already dead. I no longer use Firefox at all, so I don't care what happens to it. I do use Thunderbird (actually icedove, but it's the same thing) and I certainly don't want it to die. As long as someone keeps it going, I don't care whether it's Mozilla or someone else. There are other email choices, but none which integrate PGP encryption as easily. The newer email clients don't seem to care about encryption at all, and I won't use them. I'm especially looking at you, Nylas.

frankbell · 04-26-2016, 07:51 PM

Seamonkey is very much alive on my system. V. 2.40 was released in March.

soldersplash · 04-28-2016, 01:40 AM

Whatever is best for Thunderbird is fine by me

It sounds certain that if left with Mozilla it would wither and die.
Yay independence!

ChuangTzu · 04-28-2016, 02:18 PM

If Mozilla lets Thunderbird go, then the "community" will most likely pick it up and it will go on just fine.

Regarding Seamonkey....as stated it is doing well and still used by plenty of people, 2.40 is current version as of March 14, 2016.

mralk3 · 05-08-2016, 06:33 PM

I have been using Thunderbird for longer than any other email client. I never have technical problems and gpg works fairly well. I rely on it in Linux and on client Windows machines. If TB disappeared suppose I would move to Kmail to retain a simple gpg integration since it comes installed on Slackware by default. Not sure what client I would use for Windows.

cwizardone · 05-08-2016, 08:13 PM

Is the KDE for ms-windows project still active?

ChuangTzu · 05-09-2016, 04:10 PM

Kmail is pretty good. I also highly recommend Claws-Mail. It is a great little, yet powerful email client.

cwizardone · 05-09-2016, 06:24 PM

Last time I tried KMail it still couldn't properly forward an HTML e-mail. I don't believe that has changed, sadly, or I would use it.

mralk3 · 05-09-2016, 06:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwizardone

Is the KDE for ms-windows project still active?

I think the front page of their site indicates that it isn't active.

https://windows.kde.org/

ChuangTzu · 05-09-2016, 07:01 PM

Never tried this but what about Trojita

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...h=Trojit%C3%A1