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In this mail, I'm doing a status roundup of <u>current experiments</u>.
I'd like to know what is the status of some experiments that showed
no recent activity. I also suggest two more experiments that are,
imho, simple enough that we could try to land them in the 3.3
timeframe.<br>
<br>
<h4><b>Some big experiments of mine</b></h4>
<u>Thunderbird Conversations</u> is the most active experiment right
now, although the user base is quite low (~500 users for its current
version, the other 6k users are stuck on a one-year-old version for
the 3.1 series of Thunderbird). It's stable, feature-rich, and
provides what I think is a good replacement for the standard message
reader. There are some obscure prefs that it still needs to respect,
but honestly, I don't think that's very important, and these obscure
prefs probably shouldn't even exist. The main issue right now is
performance, and to achieve better performance, it will require an
overhaul of gloda (the oft-discussed gloda-ng). This overhaul might
happen this summer if I find the time. Otherwise, it will have to
wait. This means no immediate plans to land this.<br>
<br>
<u>Compose in a tab</u> is making progress, although at a slow pace.
It is such a massive undertaking that it will probably require more
than just one person working on it to make it happen, that is, if we
want to make it happen, and I'm still not sure of that :-). So no
plans for landing there either.<br>
<br>
<h4><b>Unknown status</b></h4>
I don't know what are the current plans for:<br>
- <u>Mute Thread.</u><br>
- <u>Thunderbird Sync (a.k.a. Weave for Thunderbird).</u><br>
- <u>Mailing list manager.</u><br>
<br>
Could anyone give some status update regarding these? Are there
plans to land them? Improve them? Keep them as addons?<br>
<br>
<h4><b>Experiments slated for landing</b></h4>
Jim (:squib) has been doing fantastic work on the <u>account
summary and folder summary</u> patches. These experiments have
been revived: they've been lying there for quite some time, but
there was no one to pick them up. IIRC, Jim said it required a whole
lot of work to make this work properly, and I think he expects to
land this in time for 3.4 rather than 3.3.<br>
<br>
<u>OpenSearch</u> and <u>GetAnAccount</u> are two addons that are
expected to land within the 3.3 timeframe. That's awesome. I think
mconley's excellent work on Ubuntu integration is expected to land
in 3.3. Can we do more? I believe the answer is yes!<br>
<br>
<h4><b>Suggestions for new experiments</b></h4>
1) A <b>very</b> cool addon created by davida is <u>webtabs</u>
(build at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/webtabs@momo.xpi">http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/webtabs@momo.xpi</a>,
source at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://hg.mozilla.org/users/dascher_mozilla.com/webtabs/">http://hg.mozilla.org/users/dascher_mozilla.com/webtabs/</a>).
It allows you to register some websites, and have a small favicon
appear for each one of them in the tab bar, next to the quickfilter
button. Clicking the favicon opens a content tab for the given
website. I've been using it for months and it works just perfectly.<br>
<br>
I think that experiment is <b>great</b>. I also think it is simple
enough that we can have some hopes of landing it in the Thunderbird
3.3 timeframe. I'd love to volunteer to do that, i.e. clean up the
code, fix bugs, and have this happen. From what I saw in the code,
this sounds reasonable.<br>
<br>
<img alt="" src="cid:part1.01040702.06040100@gmail.com" height="117"
width="248"><br>
(screenshot of the webtabs experiment)<br>
<br>
How does that sound to you? I feel this could be a very valuable
addition to Thunderbird. Do other people feel the same way? Is it
realistic to expect this for Thunderbird 3.3?<br>
<br>
2) Another idea of mine that I've been playing with is <u>RSS Tab</u>
(screenshot at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://twitpic.com/4hxz6j/full">http://twitpic.com/4hxz6j/full</a>, source at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/protz/Rss-tab">https://github.com/protz/Rss-tab</a>, build at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/rsstab-nightlies/201104091950-master.xpi">http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/rsstab-nightlies/201104091950-master.xpi</a>).
It adds a rss button next to the webtabs buttons (see screenshot
above), and gives a dashboard view for your RSS feeds. I think this
is a low-effort, high-value direction. That would give a more modern
feel to the RSS part of Thunderbird. Although the RSS (a.k.a.
NewsBlog) backend is in a pretty unpleasant state, this could still
make things cooler with Thunderbird's UI. I'd love to work more on
this, but I think I could use help from someone who's a real UI
developer, and who can help with things such as reordering feeds
through drag-and-drop, etc. That would require fixing a couple bugs
related to unread count for RSS feeds to make sure it all works
smoothly.<br>
<br>
<h4>Conclusion</h4>
I'd love to hear your thoughts about i) the "unknown status"
experiments and ii) my other suggestions. Thanks for reading this
long email,<br>
<br>
jonathan (:protz)<br>
<br>
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