Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

&quot;JavaScript is the best choice.&quot;<p>(Citation Needed).<p>This proposal identifies serious legitimate concerns with Thunderbird development going forward, but the proposed solution looks more like a hammer seeking a nail than a thoughtful approach to addressing the concerns.

Hmm, I thought Mozilla had pulled financial support from Thunderbird? This would be an exciting new chapter for the product, but the article doesn&#x27;t address whether it makes financial sense for Mozilla to invest this much in Thunderbird&#x27;s future.<p>For most of the last three years I&#x27;ve worked on Nylas Mail (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Nylas&#x2F;Nylas-mail" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Nylas&#x2F;Nylas-mail</a>), and it hit 2.0 yesterday with Mac&#x2F;Win&#x2F;Linux support. It&#x27;s entirely open source (GPL), written in JavaScript, syncs mail locally, etc. It essentially -is- what the author of the post is looking to build, except it doesn&#x27;t look like Thunderbird. Nylas put at least $2M+ worth of engineering time into it, and I imagine ThunderbirdJS would take at least a similar commitment of time and effort. Heck, maybe they could just skin Nylas Mail and call it Thunderbird ;-)

If it becomes yet another Electron package it is time to look elsewhere.

I wonder, if they want to use JS, why not QtQuick? I&#x27;m a heavy Thunderbird user but I would move to pretty much anything else if it were to switch to Electron.

It would be neat if TB would be rebased on top of Servo (and Rust) as a flagship application for using Servo as an GUI foundation, the same way as TB previously was for Gecko&#x2F;XUL.<p>Sadly I doubt TB has the resources to make that happen, but still, it would be neat...

&quot;JavaScript, if used diligently and with good design, is a very efficient language. Both in execution time, but more importantly for developers. Personally, I wrote apps in many languages, including C++, Java and JavaScript. Of those, JavaScript is by far the most productive - I am personally 4-10 times as productive as with C++.&quot;<p>Not trying to start a this language is better flame war, but is this true? I still find JS to be a strange and incomplete feeling language, but I&#x27;ve not really done much outside of front end work with it. Is it really that productive?<p>Also I&#x27;ve disliked every interaction with NPM. You end up with a huge chain of decencies for even simple applications. Is this something that&#x27;s workable with production software?

Sounds like a terrible idea, please no. I for one probably will stop using thunderbird if it gets rewritten in JS.

I&#x27;d rather see projects like Cyberfox, Thunderbird, Palemoon and Evolus Pencil (which, sadly, has been rewritten by now) taking up xulrunner, fork it and continue developing it.<p>I have yet to find a better system for rapid application development. XUL is wonderful, extentable, everybody know CSS and Javascript these days, XML is very well suited for such tasks. It&#x27;s one of the best technologies for power-users I ever came around!<p>All that was ever needed would habe been a Mozilla, that creates an XUL IDE, rather than taking up on a lot of stupid projects (Persona Light Themes, Hello Chat, FirefoxOS, removing XPFE (how coding with XUL is actually called) and whatever (the only real good thing to mention would be Ubiquity, but they killed that off as well), oh, and let&#x27;s not start talking about Firefoxy mugs, t-shirts, community barbecues, community videos... But hey, that&#x27;s what happened.<p>Now, if some people would just fork xulrunner and mirrror the addons.mozilla.org stuff...<p>As for Thunderbird, I am also pretty satisfied as it is. It may be nice, if one could set certain To: email-addresses per folder (mailing-list folders would greatly benefit from that, along with subscribe&#x2F;unsubscribe configured per such folder), alternate views onto mails and have, maybe, a modernized foldering-system.

I&#x27;m just gonna say I oppose this proposal because I&#x27;m really tired of seeing developers shy away from utilizing or learning C&#x2F;C++ only to admit much later in a project&#x27;s life cycle that those languages and their associated libraries are the best for the job. I&#x27;m all ears on utilizing JS for front end to even a desktop application but if the entire thing gets written to be ran on Servo or whatever browser engine they choose then I oppose it categorically. JS might be fine for some things but as a general programming language on a substandard runtime is just asking for trouble. Learn to write in C&#x2F;C++ for native applications or go home.

Note that this is from the end of March, and the thread continues at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.mozilla.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;tb-planning&#x2F;2017-April&#x2F;thread.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.mozilla.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;tb-planning&#x2F;2017-April&#x2F;th...</a>

&gt; We need 2 persons for the framework, 3 for backend modules, 4 for frontend UI, and 1 for theming.<p>Doesn&#x27;t 4 people dedicated to front-end UI seem excessive&#x2F;unnecessary? At least, at the beginning? I would dedicate almost all work to the framework and backend modules; UI with web technologies is far from complicated compared to everything else the client would require.

The mockups look very promising. I was never a TB user because it never looked the part in Gnome, but it&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve kept an eye on and recommended to other people.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;shots&#x2F;2917534-Thunderbird-Redesign" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;shots&#x2F;2917534-Thunderbird-Redesign</a>

I skimmed through this and saw no management of PGP, encryption, key storage, or key exhange. Is that not going to be one of the main focuses of this? I wish that PGP&#x2F;encrypted mail would be a main feature post Snowden.

Why not rewrite it in Graphene, which is the Servo&#x27;s foundation for browser.html?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;browserhtml&#x2F;browserhtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;browserhtml&#x2F;browserhtml</a>

title should be the one of the submitted e-mail: &quot;Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies&quot;, especially since &quot;is in the works&quot; doesn&#x27;t seem to be the case yet. (Lots of discussion, continuing into April, but unless I missed it no actual decision made and work begun yet.)<p>The thread is worth a read, interesting arguments regarding rewrite&#x2F;refactor&#x2F;approaches to transition.

The only point I could argue with is the choice of JavaScript, all the others seem inevitable. As a Thunderbird user I&#x27;m happy to know that I might be using it for another 20 years.<p>Even JavaScript is not that bad. I not familiar with Electron: do those apps run from a directory with the source code or are a binary file? Running from source code would make it easy to hack with the code, which is good.

&gt; We must pay attention to also keep technical qualities that many of our users rely on. An obvious one is that the new implementation must be able to quickly scroll through a list of up to 100000 messages.<p>Does any cross-platform GUI toolkit have a widget that can handle this with sane defaults?

That is awesome! I actually toyed with the same idea a couple of months ago and started a prototype, but in the end it was too much work for a single developer (having to implement IMAP&#x2F;POP backends, etc. in addition to the UI).<p>Using web technologies for desktop apps is not ideal, but at the same time it&#x27;s probably the easiest way these days to build cross-platform apps because of the lack of a good cross-platform UI toolkit.<p>A big benefit I see is that it will make it very hackable as a lot of developers are familiar with web technologies. That should be a good way to get a lot of contributors to implement features and innovate (See for example the community &#x2F; contributions around Visual Studio Code).

Mozilla already has a mail client written in Javascript and HTML 5 - the one shipping in Firefox OS.<p>And it worked decently.<p>Start by tidying it up for Android and then port it to desktop. One code base - for mobile, tablet <i>and</i> desktop.

I am a bit extreme here as I think Mozilla shall reduce efforts on firefox and make thunderbird a great product instead, one reason is that chrome is too powerful to beat already, and thunderbird could become the universal email client for all, not much contender there yet.<p>after using slack for a while i feel we can use one slack-channel for each email contact, a bit like google wave probably, and thunderbird can merge email+slack experience into one.

Whatever you do, make it render emails in a sane way. I still prefer mutt text-only rendering of emails (content) than any email rendering software, but if you&#x27;re going to render and digest html, actually do it. The total time involved in and barbarity with which web atrocities have been committed to make emails render correctly in Outlook or even Gmail cannot be understated.

Before we start thinking about working on Thunderbird or its replacement there is a fundamental question that needs answering. Is there a future for email? Email is&#x2F;was a function of the personal computer era. But as PC sales decline and smart phone sales grow do people still use email to the same extent? Is its place in field of personal communications being replaced by SMS, etc. In the business arena I am seeing some companies where internal email is not allowed. The reasoning is that email has become a way of procrastinating (send and forget). On the customer facing side of things email is being replaced by web based customer service apps that use AI (or similar) to answer the customers query ASAP, and if that is not possible get the info and pass on to a human if and only if needed (people cost money). So back to the question is email and by extension Thunderbird obsolescent. Would effort in redeveloping TB be futile as it would wind up give us wonderful app just as email disappears.

I like the idea of using web technologies for desktop application. The only major problem right now is that each application uses at least 1.5-2g of RAM each since it basically launches a full web browser under it (and chromium loves ram). We will need enormous amount of RAM soon if all applications starts to go that way...

So it&#x27;ll be a self-hosted webmail service with a custom web server that runs locally?

If it&#x27;s scoped for 3 years, does that mean it&#x27;ll take 9? =P

The backstory here is that Thunderbird devs would like to be faster but have a <i>hard</i> time working against the Gecko changes that breaks their build.<p>Sure Thunderbird kind-of works, as in it&#x27;s &quot;done&quot;, but people find Security bugs in the Firefox base and it&#x27;s not sure how they apply to Thunderbird to Thunderbird has to take the update and then they have to deal with the breakage and the incompatibility. You can&#x27;t just stop and be on Firefox 45 forever. That&#x27;s just asking for trouble.

I really like my hosted email because it&#x27;s not on my computer. I love offline software, but it all sucks for security. Dropbox, Evernote, Outlook, etc. They all just dump my data in a folder anyone with physical access to my very stealable laptop can get at. Email is especially terrifying because there&#x27;s just so much personal info in there. I have evernote and dropbox sitting in a bitlocker, so that&#x27;s okay-ish, but the email thing is just too much.

A couple of days ago I reached out to users to give a morale booster to the devs as they try to figure this rewrite business out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;65upot&#x2F;show_some_love_for_thunderbird_by_testing_bugs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;65upot&#x2F;show_some_lov...</a>

I like the gpg integration using enigmail in Thunderbird. So I can send encrypted messages to my friends and people I write code with.

&gt; JavaScript<p>Nylas all over again... Why complicate and bloat things as if it&#x27;s the obvious sensible choice?<p>The time to finally learn how to configure mutt is that much close...

The sieve plugin is still broken :-( What&#x27;s the alternative when using Thunderbird?

After many years waiting, maybe we will have a compose new email on a tab.

Interesting that mithril.js gets a mention. I really like it.

Please no. Im very happy with current state of Thunderbird.

They&#x27;ve already neglected Thunderbird for years, and now they want to start from scratch? Doesn&#x27;t sound like a good idea. Sounds more like another project they will shut down after a while.<p>I used to use both Thunderbird and Firefox a few years ago as my main mail client and browser. Since then, Mozilla started spreading between too many projects, chasing the failed phone thing, and both Firefox and even worse Thunderbird are nowhere near where their competitors are.<p>I now use Google Chrome and Google Inbox (via Electron app Wavebox, formerly WMail), and they actually look from this century. I downloaded Thunderbird a few months ago out of nostalgia, and everything looks the same as 5 years ago. Pretty sad.

I wish I could freeze the program Thunderbird in time to keep it precisely how it is right now for the next couple of decades. I literally want not change. I know, I know. It&#x27;s a pipe dream, the surrounding environment changes, breaking the program as the OS and libraries evolve. But this constant resolving of perfectly solved problems annoys me.

Mozilla just doesn&#x27;t get the message.... We don&#x27;t want your features, fixes, refreshes, rebranding, or re-imagining. We want a browser that is fast, stable, secure, minimal, and that DOES NOT FIGHT US. Let me load my old SSL certs (a warning is fine). Let me keep my preferences (why does <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;</a> disappear from my address bar every update, and my search bar keep switching back to case sensitive).<p>Stop making your problems worse and get your $#!% together! I&#x27;m a sysadmin, dangit, I need this tool to work!