>Firefox and Thunderbird have lived with competing demands for some time now
But we mashed Pocket into Firefox because we think some weird non-bookmarking bookmarking (non)solution is more important for browsing the internet than viewing emails.
>At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird.
Not many people use Thunderbird so we don't want to fix it anymore.
>These competing demands are not good for either project.
They're built on identical platforms but we just don't want to maintain Thunderbird.
>Engineers working on Thunderbird must focus on keeping up and adapting Firefox’s web-driven changes. Engineers working on Firefox and related projects end up considering the competing demands of Thunderbird, and/or wondering if and how much they should assist Thunderbird. Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it.
We don't care or think about Thunderbird when developing Firefox. Firefox is our main priority and we let Seabird die a pathetic death a long time ago so why pretend to develop anything besides just a web browser?
>“Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it”
We don't want to develop Thunderbird anymore.
I could keep paraphrasing but it's basically just "gmail rawks" over and over and over again in different words.
It's sad but basically someone needs to fork Thunderbird as it is now (FossaMail, anyone?) and just run with it from there. The beauty of Open-Source is that now the community can maintain it's own email client. If you don't want a web-based client apparently that's going to be the only way to view your emails and also not want to kill yourself going forward.
> I could keep paraphrasing but it's basically just "gmail rawks" over and over and over again in different words.
Given that the author of the mail uses Thunderbird as her mail client, it's fairly unlikely that "gmail rawks" is what she's actually thinking here.
But of course it's easier to snark about "built on identical platforms" without worrying about technical realities like "security and the need to do multiprocess require some fundamental changes to the way networking works in Gecko and changing the IMAP implementation in Thunderbird accordingly is... let's say rather involved".
Note that we (Gecko developers) have in fact taken great pains to not break Thunderbird so far, and are carrying some significant technical debt as a result. The big question is whether we should keep doing that or whether we should invest more heavily in Thunderbird to rewrite large pieces to allow Gecko to stop carrying that technical debt, or to decouple Thunderbird and Firefox in some way so that we can make the changes Firefox needs without breaking thunderbird, or something else. This mail is part of the discussion about that; mostly about figuring out which of those options we should really pursue.
>Firefox and Thunderbird have lived with competing demands for some time now
But we mashed Pocket into Firefox because we think some weird non-bookmarking bookmarking (non)solution is more important for browsing the internet than viewing emails.
>At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird.
Not many people use Thunderbird so we don't want to fix it anymore.
>These competing demands are not good for either project.
They're built on identical platforms but we just don't want to maintain Thunderbird.
>Engineers working on Thunderbird must focus on keeping up and adapting Firefox’s web-driven changes. Engineers working on Firefox and related projects end up considering the competing demands of Thunderbird, and/or wondering if and how much they should assist Thunderbird. Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it.
We don't care or think about Thunderbird when developing Firefox. Firefox is our main priority and we let Seabird die a pathetic death a long time ago so why pretend to develop anything besides just a web browser?
>“Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it”
We don't want to develop Thunderbird anymore.
I could keep paraphrasing but it's basically just "gmail rawks" over and over and over again in different words.
It's sad but basically someone needs to fork Thunderbird as it is now (FossaMail, anyone?) and just run with it from there. The beauty of Open-Source is that now the community can maintain it's own email client. If you don't want a web-based client apparently that's going to be the only way to view your emails and also not want to kill yourself going forward.