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Mozilla Corporation: Thunderbird “a tax” on Firefox Development

posted by n1 on Wednesday December 02 2015, @09:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the focused-user-experience dept.

"joekiser" writes:

In this Ars Technica article, Mozilla Corporation Chair Mitchell Baker discloses the desire to drop the Thunderbird email client altogether.

"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." Baker writes. "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."

Thunderbird has already been demoted to second-tier status, receiving only security updates since the summer of 2012. Baker's plan would turn Thunderbird over to a community product, similar to what happened with the Mozilla Suite a decade ago.

Is Mozilla's decision to laser-focus on improving Firefox going to stop their dwindling market share? Who else, besides the submitter, is still using Thunderbird? And where will you go once Thunderbird is no longer supported?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darnkitten on Wednesday December 02 2015, @06:41PM

    by darnkitten (1912) on Wednesday December 02 2015, @06:41PM (#270832)

    The clerk at the town I work for uses Thunderbird. We switched her over several years ago when Outlook refused to migrate her mail and profile through a workstation and MS Office upgrade (governmental rules require records retention). Fortunately, we were able to rescue her mail and move it to Thunderbird, and, once we got her new account tweaked to where she liked it, it has functioned the way it should.

    The UI has basically remained the same, unlike MS Office, her browsers, and other software. Mozilla hasn't put out a new version and broken compatibility with older versions , unlike Apple and MS (her Thunderbird profile has seamlessly migrated through three more upgrades). It saves her mail, it's not obtrusive, it gives her the right amount of notifications and it stays out of the way when she doesn't need to focus on it. Honestly, I think she's forgotten she ever used Outlook.

    So why use Thunderbird?--Because It Just Works, and sometimes, that's all that is needed.

    I just wish I could convince her to switch from MS Office to Libre- or OpenOffice.

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