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On 5/11/2017 11:50 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAJQvAuf05x0r3MsDshLxsyikddAukOqxgWYc7THabVvJe8YMAg@mail.gmail.com">
<pre wrap="">On the point of current Thunderbird being based on Mozilla technology
and <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/" moz-do-not-send="true">https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/</a>
saying the Mozilla Foundation has agreed to continue as Thunderbird's
"cultural home", it seems really weird for Thunderbird to be
transitioning to Electron.</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>With the legal home decision finally out in the open, I'm glad we
can start to talk about this issue.</p>
<p>I've followed <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://mykzilla.org/">Myk Melez</a>'s attempts at
variants of Gecko that are not browsers, but as far as I can tell
none have gotten any traction (Positron, qbrt, Headless Firefox).
It's not clear to me that MoCo has interest in anything other than
Firefox, and attempts to "go faster" and "focus" seem to encourage
people to actively disengage from any effort that is not focused
on a better Firefox. I don't mean that as a criticism, after all
Firefox has its own difficult race to run, but we have to face
reality.</p>
<p>But reality can change. Several of the key features that underlie
the success of the modern web were born in email technology
(XMLHttpRequest in Outlook Web Access, and GMail as the model of
the potential of AJAX to emulate a desktop app). In my dreams,
Mozilla would embrace Thunderbird as their own, and work to ensure
that Gecko technology would be effective on the entire stack of
platforms expected of a modern application. In the process a
vision of Gecko that extends to desktop, mobile, and web could
emerge.<br>
</p>
<p>But just as Firefox has a difficult race to run, so does
Thunderbird. Electron is available today, with lots of tutorials
and support, and a rapidly growing ecosystem. In contrast, as Myk
says, "qbrt is immature and unstable!". It would be great if
Mozilla would embrace qbrt or a related project, and encourage
Thunderbird to be the early demo of that. Hopefully now we will at
least be invited to those discussions. But let's get back to
today. My vision of a Thunderbird++ is an app that runs on all
currently viable platforms. When you look at new apps that target
a similar vision, what are they using? Increasingly I see Electron
for the desktop, and React/React Native for the UI and Mobile
support. (See Keybase for this week's example). Electron may have
its issues, but forking or branching Electron to solve issues is
still easier than trying to imagine bootstrapping a Gecko
equivalent.</p>
<p>For the Caspia Contacts project, we are explicitly exploring how
a common code base would support multiple platforms. In the
current sprint, we'll do a barebones HTML contacts form that runs
as a website and as an Electron app. But the goal is not really to
support Electron per se, but rather to explore how to structure
the code to be platform agnostic. We would like to understand what
advantages Electron gives us over, say, using modern browser
technologies for offline support including Service Workers and
IndexedDB.</p>
<p>So from the Thunderbird perspective, I would say that there is no
decision to use Electron as the base of Thunderbird++, and I would
hope that a decision on that would be delayed until considerably
more experience is gained with the alternatives. We would welcome
more engagement with the Mozilla platform team on how to
effectively use Gecko technologies instead.</p>
<p>:rkent<br>
</p>
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