This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of signing and encrypting emails.
Management is hard -- you can't just make a blunt statement and expect people to fall in line, especially in open-source projects. Would you have preferred a harder line? Do you think that would've been better for the community in the long run?
I'm sure everything is complicated at Mozilla because there's a Foundation and a Corporation and they work on open-source projects and do "research" stuff (like Servo) and no doubt the lines between all of these things are confusingly blurred (at least to an outsider like me, but maybe internally too), and perhaps that necessitates a hundred line missive from a lawyer about laser focus... but really, does any of it need to be that complicated?
Open Source may be well and good but the engineers at Mozilla still have to earn money for their families. Look at the Corporation's Financial Statements (https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...) - they don't exactly show a company flush with cash that is pulling support for a product because they don't like it or something.
I like Enigmail though, just as you do, and tried introducing my family to it. Sadly that didn't stick :/
I hope this isn't the end for Thunderbird.
Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our
leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox
that can have an industry-wide impact. With all due respect to
Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years
that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential.
However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live
with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is
increasingly unstable.
Perhaps they shouldn't be spending $40 million in branding and marketing expenses!
>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.
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.