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<p>On 10/02/2018 05:19, Joshua Cranmer 🐧 wrote:<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:db26e5dd-c7fa-8b2a-8987-7a92266fc0d4@gmail.com">
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<p>To answer the question somewhat obliquely, I don't think mobile
support is a good goal for Thunderbird. Instead, we should focus
on qualities that make a desktop email client more useful and
more usable:</p>
<ol>
<li>Implement CardDAV. It's embarrassing that we haven't done
this yet.</li>
<li>Improve performance, particularly on large (10,000's of
emails) mailboxes.</li>
<li>Focus on synchronization capabilities rather than developing
a mobile email client.</li>
<li>Experiment with innovation in security and privacy features.
These have long been Mozilla's forté, and it's an area where
many competitors simply can't compete.</li>
<li>Experiment with more messaging protocols than just email. A
one-stop place for managing several different firehoses of
information is a very compelling proposition, and, similarly,
the number of products who can even begin to compete here is
very few.</li>
<li>Ensure that messaging protocols remain open.<br>
</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
I want to echo Joshua's comments here.<br>
<br>
Something that in my opinion I think MoCo has done (or at least I've
felt it has done) over the last few years is that focussing on your
core product, getting that stable, reliable, fast and serving users
should be higher priority than everything else. Once you've got that
nailed then you can think about other things (whilst also keeping it
nailed).<br>
<br>
There doesn't seem to be much competition in the desktop email
market, so I think Thunderbird has had it "easy" - we've gotten away
with the existing performance etc without loosing the existing core
of our users. That might not continue forever, or it might, be we'll
also be forever struggling with what we want the architecture of
Thunderbird to be. Not a good place to be in.<br>
<br>
At the moment due to the architecture concerns etc, we don't have a
stable solution for Thunderbird itself, let alone a possible way
forward for mobile.<br>
<br>
Whilst we might want to end up with mobile, we don't have the people
to focus on that at the moment. We don't even have a prototype, user
experience design or anything else. That's going to be several
"man-years" of work to get that far.<br>
<br>
If mobile is too heavily focussed upon at this stage, we run the
risk of loosing Thunderbird desktop itself - we'll loose the
security/performance fixes of the base core that we get currently,
and we'll likely loose users or at least not gain many new ones.<br>
<br>
If concerns from being able to run Thunderbird on mobile sometime in
the future mean we spend a lot of time trying to work out an
architecture that supports mobile and desktop, then again we hurt
ourselves for keeping desktop going.<br>
<br>
At the moment we're almost at Gecko 60, and we've just about kept
Thunderbird going so far. It seems with all the changes that Firefox
is doing, that is going to get harder now, unless we make a
decision. De-xbl, de-xul are all heading this way, and the next
changes are likely to be more extensive.<br>
<br>
I think we should be dropping the mobile-future focus for now, it
certainly shouldn't be a priority.<br>
<br>
The questions should be along the lines of:<br>
<br>
* How are we going to keep Thunderbird desktop going *and improving*
over the next couple of years?<br>
* How are we going to fix some of these long standing "wishes" (e.g.
perf, address book)?<br>
* How do we get to a stage where we are comfortable with the medium
term view of Thunderbird's architecture on a core architecture? The
solution here could move us towards mobile, but that's not something
that should be a priority at this stage.<br>
<br>
If we can prove to ourselves that we can do these over the next
couple of years, and end up with something that we can more easily
continue supporting, developing & moving forward. Then maybe, a
big maybe, we can think about mobile.<br>
<br>
Mark.<br>
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