<div dir="ltr">On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 10:35 AM, Mark Banner <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mbanner@mozilla.com" target="_blank">mbanner@mozilla.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p>On 10/02/2018 05:19, Joshua Cranmer 🐧 wrote:<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<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></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>+1. Furthermore, MoCo with Firefox has done incremental changes. Some of these have involved swapping out entire components and replacing them with new ones written in a different language, but from the perspective of the whole product, the repo of record has staying in a shape that has been shippable to users.<br><br></div><div>I think the ideas of a greenfield rewrite of everything at once under the Thunderbird brand are a recipe for the death of the Thunderbird that has the users. I think Thunderbird would be better served by realistic plans for a series of piece-wise rewrites that keep the product shippable at all times from the repo of record.<br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
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></div></blockquote></div><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">That there isn't much competition in the desktop email app space and practically no competition in the space of cross-platform desktop apps make it all the more important to keep Thunderbird going and not let it be killed by rewriting everything at once or chasing mobile at this time.<br clear="all"></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Henri Sivonen<br><a href="mailto:hsivonen@hsivonen.fi" target="_blank">hsivonen@hsivonen.fi</a><br><a href="https://hsivonen.fi/" target="_blank">https://hsivonen.fi/</a></div>
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