[HN Gopher] Thunderbird 2020 Financial Report
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Thunderbird 2020 Financial Report
Author : joeyespo
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-03-22 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| soco wrote:
| On an (un)related note, I only new realized they have been all
| this time rewriting Thunderbird in JavaScript.
| [deleted]
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| That's not unrelated I think. It is interesting.
|
| Does it mean it will be slow? Does it mean it is basically
| based on Node.js?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It already is written in KavaScript for large parts. However
| Firefox/Gecko deprecated the XUL UI system, which is used by
| Thunderbird, so they have to swap the UI toolkit to something
| else.
| justin66 wrote:
| There are still multiple bugs involving loss or corruption of
| email. (the one I've got open in another tab is 13 years old) Why
| does anyone actually use this program?
| jfk13 wrote:
| Do you know of an email program without bugs? TB has been
| working well for me for many years, and apparently for a good
| number of other people as well.
|
| I'm sure it has issues - heck, I've even filed bugs against it
| personally - but your comment doesn't at all resonate with my
| experience as a user.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I haven't used TB for a while, but it has corrupted my local
| inbox once, and on two other occasions deleted e-mail from
| the server before confirming it was on disk, causing recent
| e-mails to be lost. This was all over 10 years ago, so
| perhaps it's better now.
| flas9sd wrote:
| they moved from mbox to Maildir files, so corruption is
| less likely imho as mbox files could get large in size.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Oh that probably fixed most of the problems then; mbox is
| a terrible, no good, very-bad format.
| gwillen wrote:
| Did they move? When I installed Thunderbird on my Windows
| 10 machine recently, I noted that Maildir was available
| as an option, and switched to it. But it seemed like mbox
| was still the default, and certain behavior seems to be
| glitchy on Maildir. (I get frequent notifications about
| compaction of mailboxes, despite the fact that Maildir
| cannot be, and does not need to be, compacted.)
| flas9sd wrote:
| you're right, it's a work-in-progress. It was introduced
| in v60 in 2018 as experimental feature and enabling it in
| v78 still holds a warning to it.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I'm sad. This project had so much potential in the early days.
| Right now it's relegated to just being used by some aficionados.
| tristan957 wrote:
| The project is actually the most healthy it has probably ever
| been, or at least in recent memory.
|
| Did you read the financial report at all?
| pizza234 wrote:
| I think that financial and technical status are essentially
| divorced. Good that they're getting money, but on the
| technical side, it's a rambling disaster.
|
| TB has had the embarrassing Mork backend for ages (took
| around 14 years to fix; it's not in the released version
| yet). And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been
| able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One
| window!
|
| Even ignoring the above, the addons compatibility keeps
| breaking. AFAIK that's a necessity, but as an end-user, the
| result is an increased alienation from the product.
|
| Ultimately, Thunderbird without addons is an unremarkable
| product.
| u801e wrote:
| > And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able
| to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window!
|
| Switching between windows is easy using alt-tab. Switching
| tabs requires one to do something like ctrl-pgup/pgdown or
| alt-number if you know the tab number. Personally, I think
| using alt-tab is a lot easier to switch between the compose
| and overview windows.
| 908087 wrote:
| My entire staff prefers Thunderbird to Outlook, including the
| ones who would in no way be considered "aficionados". They have
| a choice to use either, and out of 35 people none of them
| choose to use Outlook.
| Jonnax wrote:
| It's really nice to see they've got enough money to hire 15
| people.
| thepete2 wrote:
| yes, and I was glad to see they get so much in donations.
| ttul wrote:
| Absolutely. I'm really glad that the Thunderbird project is
| healthy and alive. The ecosystem very much needs a solid open
| source email client to compete with commercial alternatives -
| particularly the cloud providers with their cloud vendor
| lock-in. Re-writing Thunderbird in a more accessible
| framework (JavaScript) will doubtless help more contributors
| to work on the codebase.
| ktpsns wrote:
| > we have 15 people hired and working on the project
|
| Honest question: What are these people actually doing? I haven't
| seen new features since a long time, but Thunderbird seems to
| have reorganized one year ago
| (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/), so
| they probably plan something big, like a rewrite of the software?
| wott wrote:
| I guess they are busy removing colours, removing reliefs,
| removing textures.
| newscracker wrote:
| There are many things planned, especially moving to "web based
| technologies" for the client as a longer term initiative. The
| roadmap also has some work on JMAP support, which I hope picks
| up on mail servers too. One thing I'd love to see, which
| probably won't be on the roadmap, is native integration with
| Exchange and Exchange calendaring. I know there are some
| extensions for this, but none of those have actually worked
| well for me.
| [deleted]
| oezi wrote:
| If they could finally make Faceted Search configurable to
| show a list of results and make that list matching your
| normal view settings (e.g. not threaded) that would be
| awesome. It is really a drag that it is always 5 clicks to
| get a view where the search results are comprehensible.
| gh-throw wrote:
| A move to anything similar to Electron is gonna be the same
| to me as the project dying. In either case, I'll no longer
| use it. That's a shame.
|
| [EDIT] "but it's already XUL!" right but XUL-based GUI
| programs can run great on machines without enough memory to
| use Slack or VSCode without hitting swap, even if those were
| the only programs open. My source for this: I've been using
| XUL apps since the days when machines with 128MB of system
| memory were pretty damn high-end. They were kinda heavy back
| then, but basically fine. They're straight-up lightweight by
| today's standards.
| u801e wrote:
| While that's true, I've noticed that my installation of
| Thunderbird has recently started allocating anywhere from
| 30 to 40% of resident memory (%mem column in top), and it
| takes a very long time to switch tasks to or from
| Thunderbird. It's an older laptop with 6 GB of RAM, but I
| don't recall encountering issues like this on much older
| machines with just megabytes of system memory.
| pitaj wrote:
| Thunderbird already needs HTML and CSS for rendering
| emails, and needs JS for XUL anyways, right? So Thunderbird
| already needs HTML, CSS, and JS engines at any given time.
| Where will the memory bloat come from by moving to using
| HTML, CSS, and JS for the UI?
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| It's the culture of Electron and NodeJS/NPM and their
| programming style. Switching to Electron wouldn't require
| adopting those, but the practices associated with the
| "modern JS" crowd are almost certain to end up infecting
| the way that Thunderbird is developed just like it has
| infected essentially everything about the way anyone does
| JS these days.
| mplanchard wrote:
| "Web-based technologies" doesn't necessarily mean something
| like electron. Firefox used the same language and has
| largely completed their migration away from XUL. You can
| see details in the roadmap here: https://docs.google.com/do
| cument/d/1ORqed8SW_7fPnPdjfz42RoGf...
| gh-throw wrote:
| I definitely don't consider Firefox's resource use
| (battery, CPU, memory) something to aim for. Pre 2.0
| Firefox? Hell yes, it was part of what got everyone on it
| in the first place. After 2.0, when it started to bloat
| rapidly for unclear reasons? Not so much.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Firefox 2 was released 14 years ago. It's perhaps time to
| upgrade your computer or to stick with old software.
| gh-throw wrote:
| 1) Yes, I know, _that 's_ how long Firefox has been going
| down the wrong path, performance-wise. They've only
| recently seemed to kinda start addressing that ("now
| we're as good as Chrome, finally!" OK but Chrome is also
| bad, so....)
|
| 2) I'd prefer software just, you know, not be bad.
| Safari, for all its problems, demonstrates that there's
| nothing inherent in a modern desktop web browser that
| requires it to be grossly inconsiderate of your system
| resources.
| u801e wrote:
| I'm still unsure why certain websites result in browser
| processes using up substantial resources in terms of CPU
| time or system memory. I typically will search for "Web
| Content" processes in top and kill the ones that are
| taking more than a certain percent of resident memory or
| using more than 20% CPU time just to keep the computer
| usable.
|
| That's not a problem I recall encountering in the days of
| Firefox 2.0.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > I've been using XUL apps since the days when machines
| with 128MB of system memory were pretty damn high-end. They
| were kinda heavy back then, but basically fine. They're
| straight-up lightweight by today's standards.
|
| Right, but even XUL has grown quite a bit since those days
| - not to mention that it's pretty much dead at this point.
| Still, something other than "yet another desktop app built
| around some descendant of KHTML" would be nice.
|
| There are basically four ways this could go:
|
| 1. Thunderbird spearheads a Gecko-based alternative to
| Electron (following Firefox in deprecating XUL)
|
| 2. Thunderbird throws in with the various XUL-preserving
| Firefox forks to maintain XUL as a Gecko-based alternative
| to Electron (since the Firefox folks don't seem to have any
| interest in doing so)
|
| 3. Thunderbird switches to some native-widgeted toolkit
| like Qt or GTK
|
| 4. Thunderbird switches to Electron
|
| These are in order of my preference. Option 1 also
| thankfully seems to be Thunderbird's current direction,
| though it'd be nice if it could spearhead the necessary
| documentation and niceties for _other_ applications to use
| Gecko in desktop apps.
| brnt wrote:
| Actually, the Thunderbird team throwing its weight behind
| Kmail/Contact, a client plagued by UX papercuts and a
| less than stable foundation (akonadi), but otherwise
| pleasant to use and portable sounds like an awesome idea!
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| 5. A rewrite in Flutter
| sebmellen wrote:
| Oh no, this means we're in for another Electron app. I don't
| have anything against Electron, but... Man does it get
| tedious.
| xfer wrote:
| Thunderbird is already using gecko. You can't do an email
| client for general public without html rendering.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I'm more concerned about the Electron/Chrome browser
| monopoly (not that Firefox has done itself many favors
| lately).
|
| Maybe they will pull it off with just gecko, that would
| be neat.
| KwanEsq wrote:
| They are just mirroring Firefox's (and thus Gecko's) own
| deprecation of XUL in favour of (X)HTML. Firefox's top
| level windows are now (X)HTML with XUL elements, and XUL
| specific elements and code paths are gradually being
| replaced with standard HTML elements or custom elements.
| u801e wrote:
| Given that the general public has largely moved on to web
| interfaces or mobile apps for email access, do we really
| need to render HTML emails in Thunderbird? I have mine
| set to display messages as plain text.
| brnt wrote:
| I wish it weren't so, but more than half of mails I
| receive are HTML only. I think it's passed station.
| Karunamon wrote:
| As a technical user, how often is the HTML content
| actually useful to the content of the message? For some
| anecdata, I'm a heavy user of Mutt, and I get my HTML
| mails piped through w3m --dump for display.. I might have
| to invoke a web browser on the content once every few
| months?
| merb wrote:
| why evenn care about JMAP. better support EWS/ActiveSync.
| JMAP is still in such an early stage and no matter if
| proprietary or not, there is still no protocol out there that
| does the same things than EWS/ActiveSync.
| arendtio wrote:
| Well, at first I thought the same. But honestly I don't really
| care if features are being added as long as they don't break
| too much. A few years, ago I switched to Thunderbird from Kmail
| because the KDE people constantly managed to break Kmail.
|
| I still use KDE as a desktop environment and while I think
| Kmail looks better, Thunderbird just works so much better (e.g.
| faster, better RSS integration, better search results) that I
| am quite happy that I switched.
| ajosh wrote:
| I've noticed that many of the linux repos are not up to date.
| If you're using those, you probably need to install it directly
| from the website to get the latest version and see the updates.
|
| The major features that have come out lately that I've noticed
| are first-party calendar integration and first-party GPG
| support. There was a calendar integration but I always found it
| to be a bit funny and hard to get working all of the way. I
| never had problems with Enigmail, however.
|
| Both features work much more solidly as an included part of
| Thunderbird. There are other, smaller features that have come
| in like having e-mail addresses in the To/CC/BCC lines be
| places into ovals to show them as a distinct, drag-able
| element.
|
| The Thunderbird codebase is old and is full of a ton of
| features, transforming it in a way that is true to its past and
| moves towards a better future is going to take time but it is
| coming along. Sure, some of the major features were available
| as plug-ins but they're much more solid now that they're built-
| in.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I still haven't been able to get the new GPG integration
| working with my Yubikey, that whole path seems not super
| well-supported yet. And Enigmail doesn't run on more recent
| versions of Thunderbird.
|
| I haven't had to work with encrypted email for a little bit,
| but I think the next time I do it'll push me to another email
| client if I still haven't gotten this working.
| ylk wrote:
| You'll have to do some additional configuration:
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I _thought_ I had installed the flatpak for Thunderbird some
| time ago, but apparently I was wrong; I 'm still pulling the
| RPMs down from Fedora repos.
|
| Those seem pretty close to upstream, however. I got an update
| for it just last week.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > I've noticed that many of the linux repos are not up to
| date
|
| This is very tricky.
|
| Thunderbird keeps breaking addons compatibility (as an end
| user, I don't care if this is justified or not), by
| supporting main versions for short times (v68 was released
| less than two years ago).
|
| An O/S like LTS Ubuntu, which has a 4+ years support cycles,
| is systematically forced to break TB compatibility during
| each cycle, which is contrary to the O/S versioning
| guidelines (which typically freeze the program versions, with
| the exception of security upgrades, e.g. web browsers).
|
| As a side effect, addons, which give TB a significant value
| (I'd argue that they give its only value - even Google
| Calendar is not natively supported) slowly disappear.
|
| Thunderbird is essentially systematically and forcefully
| breaking versioning and compatibility. I believe something's
| broken in the team/company.
| silon42 wrote:
| IMO, distros should start packaging good addons anyway.
| lrem wrote:
| First-party GPG support would be so nice to have some decades
| ago. By now seems everyone admitted defeat. Companies
| standardized on email as notification system for "you got a
| message in the actually secure medium". Humans standardized
| on using some inherently safe (but usually not open)
| communicator. Who is there still wanting secure email?
| bsder wrote:
| > By now seems everyone admitted defeat.
|
| Well, since everybody is using Gmail or Office365 _anyway_
| , encrypted email is kind of pointless, no?
| ajosh wrote:
| This question (and the one above right now) are good
| points. GPG isn't really a killer feature right now. I
| likewise haven't needed secure e-mail in a while. I just
| happened to notice it when it migrated stuff over. I
| stopped using my Yubikey with gpg a while back.
|
| All of that said - I'm replying to this message and not the
| other because there is one use for secure e-mail that may
| make a difference: DeltaChat. Deltachat uses autocrypt
| which includes your public key in headers. With autocrypt
| in place, Thunderbird can still read DeltaChat messages.
|
| I'm not sure if DeltaChat will ever take off in large
| numbers but it seems like a decent option for secure
| chat/IM.
| lrem wrote:
| First time I hear of DeltaChat. Does it use email as the
| actual transport? Sounds prone to stupid latency. What's
| the benefit over Matrix?
| gsich wrote:
| Latency is not that bad usually.
| brnt wrote:
| It does, and the benefit is that anyone with an email
| address can already be approached via Deltachat, because
| all it does is send and receive email through the
| Autocrypt protocol, which gracefully degrades with
| clients that don't support it.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The roadmap is here
| https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap
| throwaway3neu94 wrote:
| All I really want is a great conversations view like Gmail
| has.
|
| Sadly they only mention it in passing (it's blocked by global
| indexing).
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| Depending on what you mean there are a couple of extensions
| which help: Conversations [1] and ThreadVis [2].
|
| Thunderbird is slowly becoming less dated, but I'm not sure
| Gmail's UI is necessarily what email client designers
| should be aspiring to. The former lead designer of Gmail
| (and Inbox) hated it so much that he has put hundreds of
| hours into maintaining personal modifications. Now that's
| he's trying to turn it into a business, the marketing site
| is a bit more original and there's fewer strongly worded
| criticisms but I'm sure you can read between the lines [3].
|
| [1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-
| US/thunderbird/addon/gmail... [2]
| https://addons.thunderbird.net/En-
| uS/thunderbird/addon/threa... [3] https://simpl.fyi/
| EMM_386 wrote:
| I'm happy to see that the Mork file format is finally on its
| way out ("Kill Mork" [TB78-TB91-TB2022]).
|
| 17 years ago, a Mozilla engineer called it "the single most
| braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen
| year career".
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438
| flobosg wrote:
| That engineer was Jamie Zawinski, by the way.
| the8472 wrote:
| Since thunderbird tracks the firefox codebase and firefox moved
| to webextensions that broke a lot of thunderbird extensions
| too. They mitigated the fallout.
|
| E.g. the virtual identities extension now is a first party
| feature.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| So the typical Thunderbird user speaks German and runs Windows
| 10.
| needtheaccount wrote:
| I made an account to ask this.
|
| 1. Why is there no Thunderbird for Android? It's the only project
| that I trust with my emails on my phone.
|
| 2. What do Android users use as an email client on their phones?
|
| I current cannot access email on my phone. Maybe it is better
| this way, security wise. But if Thunderbird was available for
| Android I might consider using it.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I have been using FairEmail for a month now. It's privacy
| centric and has loooooots of features. It is ad-free. It does
| not open stuff that may be used to track you by default. It can
| do GPG and so much more. It is developped by a single and very
| responsive developper for now. I liked it so much I bought the
| premium version to support his work but paid features are quite
| niche and you won't click on something only to find out that
| you need the paid version. https://email.faircode.eu/
| tecleandor wrote:
| I use "K-9 Mail"
| brnt wrote:
| If it was available on the desktop I might actually prefer it
| over Thunderbird.
| walrus01 wrote:
| What I want most out of Thunderbird is a self hostable web
| application that I can run on my own servers, and access as
| TLS1.3 in a browser, as a modern webmail app as competition for
| Rainloop and Roundcube.
|
| I realize this would probably require a complete re-write.
| anotherevan wrote:
| I occasionally see their jobs page[1] and think I would love to
| work there, but I must admit being hired through Upwork gives me
| pause.
|
| [1] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/careers/
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Implementing a better vertical layout by exploring the
| possibility of not using the <tree> XUL element and relying on a
| highly scalable and equally performant HTML component.
|
| Hey, does that mean we can have two lines per mail in the mail
| column :) ?
|
| Otherwise, I am not convinced by matrix integration. Unless it's
| a deep one and creates new scenarios impossible with two
| standalone applications.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > not using the <tree> XUL element and relying on a highly
| scalable and equally performant HTML component.
|
| Another question is: there's no HTML tree component.
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(page generated 2021-03-22 23:00 UTC)