Burningbird

Shelley: You may remember that the new open-source Eudora was going to be based on Thunderbird. I now wonder where that project stands or where it heads for.

Well i switched to Gmail over a year ago and i am still happy that i did. Sorry it just works better for me … search, spam filtering, tagging, and sustainability across computers being the primary reasons. Your mileage, of course, will vary and you can come back here and crow in a couple of years if Google f***s me up. Sometimes isn't "just working better - all things considered" more important than one's political feelings?

(fIrST P057) — pokes nose at Seth

Hmm. Dropping Thunderbird seems shortsighted.

Sure, there are other open source mail-and-news clients so Thunderbird isn't quite as critical a piece of infrastructure as Mozilla was, but there are plenty of threats to the open Internet that don't go through the Web (spam and phishing, for example). Secure email based on open standards is just as important as secure browsing based on open standards, and Microsoft has not been averse to throwing it's weight around in this area.

A simple but extensible communication client is potentially just as big a win as a simple but extensible browser, especially if you extend communication to include syndication feeds as well as mail/news. A communication client is also a more natural integration point for Desktop Search, not to mention weblog search (and associated revenues).

This all points to mozilla's success as a platform to me. People feel the browser is powerful enough to serve as their computing platform for a whole variety of activities.

I have to say I rather prefer web mail to email clients. One less costly thing to manage. 90% of email is spam now. You can't fight that on your own with your own mail client.

You can’t fight that on your own with your own mail client.

Wow, why didn’t anyone tell me? Good to know! :-)

Let me state here for the record: I’ll never ever switch to web mail. If you don’t think I can make such a statement with certainty, chew on this: I’m 30 and have never owned a cell phone.

As for Thunderbird, I’m not sure how to feel about this move. While a Thunderbird separated from Firefox C… Mozilla Corporation may not be able to survive on its own, it won’t flourish in the arms of Fi… err Mozilla Corporation either.

A comment left on Mitchell's post floats an interesting theory — unfortunately her blog doesn't have permalinks for comments, so I reproduce it here in full:

I have a theory about why Mozilla Foundation may be getting rid of Thuderbird. Here it is:

Since Google is a primary funder of the Mozilla Foundation, and since Google is actively developing and offering their own enterprise grade email ecosystem via gmail and google apps, maybe they are wanting to kill off or hinder the development of Thunderbird to “encourage” those wanting to ditch the Outlook/Exchange Juggernaut to move to Google, instead of utilizing a Thunderbird and Lightning integrate application with an open source groupware backend.

You know, in general, corporate funders of not-for-profits have ulterior motives, so this is a reasonable theory for why cutting Thunderbird from the Mozilla Foundation “makes sense” all of a sudden.

Posted by: Vaughn at July 26, 2007 9:59 AM

I must say this makes more sense to me than anything Mitchell wrote.

This move has been telegraphed for a while - see Brendan Eich's post from April, and Ben Goodger's reply. They (MoFoCo) still believe in the platform:

And I'll add (again) that the best hope for XUL as a platform, apart from uplifting pieces of XUL along with other stuff (such as offline app support) into the web standards, is Mozilla 2.

and that it's not that they think email is dead, but organisational issues they want to avoid by spinning off Thunderbird:

Money is not the issue. Hiring is one issue. Management bandwidth is another. Build infrastructure is yet another. Organization focus is yet another

[…] agree with Shelley Powers when she says that it is all about browser. Mozilla's recent focus has been exclusively on the browser. The browser has not only taken […]

A comment left on Mitchell’s post floats an interesting theory

According to Mitchell, Google has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Hi Shelly, a few comments FWIW:

* First, Mozilla as a platform is alive and well, but big platforms beget bigger (or littler; both really) platforms on their backs. Facebook is a platform now, and the Web is the main platform on which Mozilla must focus. Our maximum leverage to move the Web platform forward is Firefox. So we would be irresponsible not to put most of our energy into Firefox, both as browser and as platform bearer.

* Second, Mozilla is big and broad; we're about much more than any one thing. No one-bit thinking. We have secondary and tertiary platform focal points: the Firefox addons, and the XUL applications such as Joost, Songbird, AllPeers, and Miro (formerly Democracy). We invest a lot, as the Mozilla Foundation and the community, in these platforms. Never enough to suit some folks who consume the platform as an open source commodity, but it would be suicidal for us to "do platform" only (see first point).

* Third, email is a challenging space, harder in some ways that browsing. For Thunderbird to compete with the Firefox focus puts it in a hard place within the Mozilla Foundation, where the work has gone on since 2003. A separate organization can only help.

* Fourth, Mitchell and I are agreed that more than the three-pane desktop email client should be explored to solve the larger email challenge. That is out of scope for Thunderbird in the minds of its lead developers. If anyone has a problem with that, either persuade them to enlarge their scope, or participate in the larger conversation that Mitchell initiated. We're not done with mail, but we do need new thought and code leaders to transcend Thunderbird.

Another thing.

I know you were unhappy with my comments about RDF last year. I'd like to point something out in my defense that's relevant here. Joost integrates Redland for its RDF needs. That's a great choice, better than our old RDF code. It could be that we'll adopt Redland some day, but right now it makes no sense when competing head to head with IE and other browsers, trying to advance the Web incrementally. This is not arrogance, but pragmatism.

Pragmatism of the Mozilla kind rubs many people the wrong way. Why shouldn't we invest liberally in various dark horses and lost causes, such as our old RDF code or an upgrade to it, and even take the footprint (download and runtime) hit of including such features? I think the answer has to be stated bluntly: because we'll fail if we do that, and then the Firefox lever against Microsoft and anyone else with large market power and little concern for the Open Web will have an easier time.

We've had to say "no" to other platform features (MNG, XForms) in the past, and we revisit these decisions fairly frequently (both based on sound reason, and based on recurrent complaints from fans who form a tiny minority).

The good news about Thunderbird is that it can step out of Firefox's shadow finally, now that it will have its own organization managing the road forward and its release and support processes.

Anyone who thinks Google controls us needs to wake up and smell the coffee. I could have gone to Google six years ago, and be retired now. I'm not doing this for the money (my salary is in line for my age and position). Google might have liked to acquire Firefox three years ago, but that would have broken the open source community. Here we are, yet still people suffering from "one-bit" thinking like to make accusations of dishonesty and malice, instead of reasoning from our premises to our conclusions using the open logic we've publicized repeatedly. Why is that?

/be

* Third, email is a challenging space, harder in some ways that browsing. For Thunderbird to compete with the Firefox focus puts it in a hard place within the Mozilla Foundation, where the work has gone on since 2003. A separate organization can only help.

* Fourth, Mitchell and I are agreed that more than the three-pane desktop email client should be explored to solve the larger email challenge. That is out of scope for Thunderbird in the minds of its lead developers. If anyone has a problem with that, either persuade them to enlarge their scope, or participate in the larger conversation that Mitchell initiated. We're not done with mail, but we do need new thought and code leaders to transcend Thunderbird.

Huh. Now THAT makes a lot more sense than what has been put forth as your primary reasons.

So, basically, you're unsatisfied that because of how Thunderbird originated (as a leftover when Mozilla broke up the suite due to the Firefox momentum) it never went through the 'trial by fire' that the original Phoenix browser (and lots of other alternative gecko-based browsers) did, and would like the opportunity for a dark-horse project with a different UI to gain popularity and challenge the status-quo.

So, what is the gecko-equivalent reusable core for email in Thunderbird that would make an alternate email desktop client a viable one-or-two-person project?

Personally, my one missing feature is the lack of 'reply-to-list'. Aside from the feature itself, the apparent impossibility of adding this via an extension that doesn't hack the internals (or that depends on another extension to do the hacking) has always been troubling to me. This is bug 45715. Without reply-to-list, I am sticking with Evolution, which means I have to use a separate client for NNTP. Bleh.

It seems to me that without basics like an API to access all headers even if they aren't being displayed, it should hardly be surprising that Thunderbird only has one fifth as many extensions available as Firefox, and no equivalent to Greasemonkey. As far as I know, Firefox extension hackers never had to deal with nonsense like only half of the DOM being available.

So, the question is, will kicking Thunderbird out into the cold give you the result you're looking for? I don't know, but it should be interesting (and maybe I'll finally get my reply-to-list out of it).

Updated to add: If it works, then Thunderbird could see the same kind of explosive growth as Firefox, which would be a very good thing.

[…] wanted to point out that Brendan Eich from the Mozilla Corporation left a thoughtful comment on my post about Mozilla and […]

Michael: I don't think "kicking Thunderbird out in the cold" is a fair metaphor, but otherwise you make good points. And look at that low bug number! With more open source community action such as the kind Firefox enjoys, all of the bugs you cite should be quickly fixed.

/be

(Shelley: sorry for misspelling your name!)

No worries on the name. Nobody gets it right, including my mother.

I appreciate your forthright answer. What you say does make sense. I have to say, though, that I don't think Thunderbird will survive this split. It's not the product, or even the community, it's the very nature of the split, itself.

But I've been wrong in the past.

Brendan, I apologize for the somewhat over-the-top description. Would 'pushing out of the nest' be more fair?

In any case, my question about a central reusable component in TB is wasn't entirely rhetorical. Is there an answer?

Unless there is a reasonable story around code re-use that encourages (or at least enables) others to experiment with different UI styles (or, if you like, philosophy), I don't see how you'll get the kind of experimental competition among several clients that improved gecko and eventually led to the creation of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

Absent that kind of re-use (which enlarges the circle of stakeholders because the code becomes infrastructure) and competition, there is no reason to think that TB or any successor will abandon the 3-pane metaphor unless something else became mainstream elsewhere. And I have a horrible feeling that TB could just wither and die, eventually.

However, the strategy could work, especially if there is a re-use story that I am just not aware of and that just needs to be publicized better.

The mail/news back end code is usable enough that Nick Kreeger is building Correo, a Cocoa front end for it (analogous to Camino). See http://www.nkreeger.com/correo/. Nick seems busy with a Summer of Code Thunderbird roaming project at the moment.

/be

Hmm. Well, I find that enouraging, but considering the number of gecko-based browsers that preceded Phoenix, only slightly. Of course, Correo has the usual 3-pane UI too.