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<p>FWIW, as it concerns myself, I am not proposing to focus on
mobile. I personally focus on having a Thunderbird desktop client
that can still be a great option in 10-20 years.</p>
<p>Mobile is just the "cherry on top". Given that we are at a
cross-road, and need to make fundamental technical decisions, I
think it would be foolish to ignore mobile, given that more than
50% of users are on mobile, and Android is the largest OS now.<br>
</p>
<p>What I think is the best solution for the desktop also happens to
be a good base for a future mobile client.</p>
<p>For Thunderbird's future, for me, 3 qualities are the most
important, in order of importance:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Clear horizontal module separation with stable API</li>
<li>Written in JS and HTML5/CSS<br>
</li>
<li>Good choice of platform APIs (file, TCP etc.) and widget
toolkit (TODO)</li>
</ul>
<p>These same qualities would also be important to attract new
contributors with a graceful learning curve, allow powerful
extensions that do not break all the time, and add new features
with less effort.</p>
<p>Ben<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 14.02.2018 um 10:35 schrieb Mark
Banner:<br>
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<p>On 10/02/2018 05:19, Joshua Cranmer 🐧 wrote:<br>
</p>
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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>
<br>
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