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?
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Thursday December 03 2015, @03:23AM
I'd put money on there being more GMail users alone than Thunderbird users.
Webmail is certainly the popular approach to mail these days. Local clients are a thing of the past.
Look at how rarely you see anyone advertise their mail client, or how few you can even name. Most of them have ceased to be, or at least stagnated just like Thunderbird.
I found This article [labnol.org] from July 2012. Not a reliable source, but it does show how popular the webmails are.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday December 04 2015, @09:44AM
It is an interesting feature. When the rest of the universe is moving away from in-browser things to "Apps", why is email moving to webmail? Is it lack of local storage on mobile platforms? Is it just that there is no decent email client out there?
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Friday December 04 2015, @10:40PM
The big draw is that webmail is easy to setup (no server settings for users to worry about, almost never firewall blocks, etc), and it replicates all e-mail (and everything related) to all devices, effectively in real-time.
As for mobile apps, most of the ones that can be done as a website aren't much more than a customized browser UI. This includes most shopping apps.