Great to see Mozilla backing off from quixotic tasks like building a phone OS but I still feel like they don't understand what we need them for. They are the organization that we need to keep the client side of the Internet free and open.
Here's what that will take:
- Make Firefox the best browser in the world at the fundamentals: speed, stability, standards support.
- Become the free, open, OS agnostic app platform of choice: don't cede this frontier to Chrome and Electron. Make the open web platform the best platform for more and more apps. (MAYBE take a shot at a phone OS after the Firefox App ecosystem rivals Android and iOS.)
- Following from the previous bullet, quit wasting resources on browser UX experiments - browser UX matters less every year as web apps get freed from the browser.
- Be the absolute gold standard in user privacy and freedom - the stuff Brave is doing is the trail Mozilla was supposed to blaze.
- Invest in Thunderbird again and fix the client side of email - because messaging is just as important as the web and we are losing to closed competitors hard and fast there.
Mozilla's supposed to be our champion of an open web client platform. For too long they've just been a browser in decline and a bunch of random side projects. Cleaning up the browser is a good start but we need more.
From a passionate Firefox user (even though Chrome runs faster on Linux).
> Invest in Thunderbird again and fix the client side of email - because messaging is just as important as the web and we are losing to closed competitors hard and fast there.
I was right with you until Thunderbird. I look at Thunderbird as one of Mozilla's many distractions. We don't need another open source desktop email client at the expense of the browser.
So long as we have a secure browser, there are others who can provide secure email services with a web client.
I'm not the guy you're arguing with but this is literally the argument you're making. You're saying that Thunderbird is not necessary. That's an opinion. You likely hold this opinion because you don't use it. If you did use Thunderbird, you may feel differently. If you used Thunderbird and it shut down, you'd feel sad. You'd want them to keep working on it.
I say working on the I-5 freeway is a waste of time, because I've never driven on it. But thousands of other people do. And they probably feel that it's an important road in their lives. It's not a straw man, it's the other side of your argument. You just disagree. That doesn't make it a straw man.
While I would normally agree, this is the one "side project" I think they should have kept. We really need an imap5 or some standard which addresses the modern problems with email. Who else is going to represent the client perspective and maintain the reference client implementation without being a corporate shill?
Plus Thunderbird is a huge C++ project. It seems like a modern desktop mail client could be built more quickly using Electron. There are already JavaScript libraries for IMAP. Thunderbird could be innovating on new client features instead of trying to keep up with the treadmill of Gecko C++ changes.
Here's what that will take:
- Make Firefox the best browser in the world at the fundamentals: speed, stability, standards support.
- Become the free, open, OS agnostic app platform of choice: don't cede this frontier to Chrome and Electron. Make the open web platform the best platform for more and more apps. (MAYBE take a shot at a phone OS after the Firefox App ecosystem rivals Android and iOS.)
- Following from the previous bullet, quit wasting resources on browser UX experiments - browser UX matters less every year as web apps get freed from the browser.
- Be the absolute gold standard in user privacy and freedom - the stuff Brave is doing is the trail Mozilla was supposed to blaze.
- Invest in Thunderbird again and fix the client side of email - because messaging is just as important as the web and we are losing to closed competitors hard and fast there.
Mozilla's supposed to be our champion of an open web client platform. For too long they've just been a browser in decline and a bunch of random side projects. Cleaning up the browser is a good start but we need more.
From a passionate Firefox user (even though Chrome runs faster on Linux).