17 ms·

Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

338 points by azdle 9y ago

sachleen 9y ago
With how unrealistic experience expectations can be for positions, It's nice to see they're looking at junior and senior candidates and have this line: B.S. in Computer Science would be lovely, but real-world experience is preferred.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
carussell 9y ago
The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! XUL is really cool. Still one of my favorite GUI kits. It is like electron (but actually native!) and had a good reason to be slow (spidermonkey wasn't super fast) :( XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM
  - adjagu 9y ago
    I miss the old easter eggs Firefox had. https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...
    - sp332 9y ago
      about:mozilla still works.
      - DrPhish 9y ago
        about:about shows that about:robots still works, at least
        adjagu 9y ago
        Thank you. I hadn't seen the about:robots page before.
      - cpeterso 9y ago
        and about:robots
        adjagu 9y ago
        Thank you for this. At least we can hope that Mozilla's version of SkyNet should at least be human friendly.
      - adjagu 9y ago
        Thank you for this. I had forgotten about the about: pages.
  - sp332 9y ago
    It's not that XUL was bad, exactly. But priorities have changed to security, battery life, and multi-threaded performance. The weight of XUL cruft that has built up over time was holding the project back.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      Do you think using XML external entities declared in DTD files for localization was a good idea? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Localization https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu...
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    How was XPCOM better than MS COM? Feature set? Nope. Tooling? Nope. Language support? Nope. Ecosystem? Nope. OLE components? Nope. Distributed COM? Nope. Doesn't trigger knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reactionaries even though it's a shallow clone of Microsoft technology? Check. Did you know that "decomification" was a word? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194385 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194385
    - tomc1985 9y ago
      XPCOM was better mainly because it was Mozilla docs instead of Microsoft. I was doing MS COM in a previous job and I swear MSDN is written in sanskrit
- taf2 9y ago
  I have fond memories of XPCOM and XUL... Back in 04 we had a desktop application mostly a collection of C++ bindings to the Firebird database and for silly reasons I started the GUI with Gtk+ but as we continued to struggle with porting to Win32 (like we sell this to people in Win32 not Linux) and I started to find a need to embed web content (cause like we should have written the whole thing as a web app - native apps are silly). I recall hacking the event loop to get Gtk+ and gecko to play nice in Win32. Anyways, XPCOM allowing me to write IDL files and expose my C++ work as JavaScript was at the time amazing and allowed me to quickly rewrite most of the UI in XUL and keep all the SQL work we'd done such that if I recall correctly we were able to port the application some 500k lines of code over to XUL. This was right before XulRunner... I still to this day feel good things about IDL/XPCOM and XUL for converting to see the light with JavaScript and HTML. XUL is just like a basically less well supported version of HTML and so is that MS markup language and event Gtk+'s Glade is just an XML editor for a UI... I beleive even OSX via xcode has an underlying XML format to describe the UI... and IMO HTML is light years ahead for UI.
  - tzahola 9y ago
    > and IMO HTML is light years ahead for UI LOL. Last time I checked you still couldn't make an image fill the available space while keeping its aspect ratio :D
    - Cyberdog 9y ago
      img { width: 100%; height: auto; }
      - bzbarsky 9y ago
        That won't work right; it can overflow vertically. Consider the case of a 10x10 image in a container of width 500px and height 100px... Ideally you would want it to end up 100x100, but it will end up 500x500 with that CSS.
        mikewhy 9y ago
- kylehotchkiss 9y ago
  Sweeeeeeet. Maybe they'll be competitive with Mail.app. if they could match the speed and design of new Firefox, and support loading a bigger set of past emails than Mail.app can without performance issues, i'd love to use Thunderbird.
- dlandis 9y ago
  > The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. Well it is only a six month contract for a single developer.
  - carussell 9y ago
    Sure, but the big thing is the "serious" part. We're basically talking about the patch paradox[1]. At any point in time, someone could have stepped up and made it known they were willing to do the necessary work to move off XUL. But without a similar commitment from upstream to accept a future involving a mail client built on web standard tech, it would be a wasted effort. Heck, Nylas even built their own such email client, relicensed it to a compatible license (GPL -> MIT), reached out to say, "please use this" and ask how they could help, and still nothing happened. 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2017/08/06/contributors-dilemma.html https://www.colbyrussell.com/2017/08/06/contributors-dilemma...
    - nirv 9y ago
      There're many decent web-based proprietary mail solutions, and I was really excited once Nylas Mail showed up, even though it's Electron-based. And then instantly disappointed by its license. Later, I was considering switching to Nylas Mail when they re-licensed their open-source client, but turned out by "please use this" they still require you to opt-in with Nylas Identity tied to Nylas Cloud[1] They could only help replace free (from mail vendors) Thunderbird, playing by the rules of the Thunderbird. [1] https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/3484 https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/3484
      - carussell 9y ago
        > but turned out by "please use this" they still require you to opt-in with Nylas Identity tied to Nylas Cloud We're talking about Thunderbird development. When I wrote that they changed to a compatible license and reached out to say "please use this", that's not referring to their attempt to get users. That's a reference to their attempt to donate their code and energy towards improving Thunderbird. > They could only help replace free (from mail vendors) Thunderbird, playing by the rules of the Thunderbird. Huh?
tambourine_man 9y ago
7 million lines of code, Windows, Mac and Linux support… looks a lot of work for a single person.
- AngeloAnolin 9y ago
  There is likely a team working on this. The job posting said for someone to come on board. And yes, hiring a single developer to work all alone by himself would be akin to killing the project itself as just understanding the codebase, design, technology and architecture would be too much for one person to handle. We’re looking for an amazing developer to come on board to help make Thunderbird the best Email client on the planet!
  - sp332 9y ago
    Thunderbird was moved to "community development" with Mozilla providing only stability and security updates. https://web.archive.org/web/20161003075603/https://blog.mozilla.org/beyond-the-code/2012/07/09/about-the-future-of-thunderbird/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161003075603/https://blog.mozi... In the interview it says that employees might only work on the project part-time.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Quite a bit of that code was shared between Thunderbird, Firefox and Seamonkey. But now Firefox don't want to play along any more, and dragging the other two along for the ride...
jordigh 9y ago
Huh, I was going to post this story, but I thought it was not allowed because it's a job posting and I had to wait until the Who is Hiring thread. So, if posting jobs for working on free applications is ok outside of Who Is Hiring, let me try to advertise this job for another free email client, Mailpile, which got killed when I tried to post it earlier: https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/ https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/ I currently use Evolution for email, which is ok and I've gotten used to its limitations, but I would love a more modern client! Edit: I guess it's not ok. I'm confused.
- FroshKiller 9y ago
  Thunderbird is a popular mail client that has at times had a pretty uncertain future. I imagine that azdle posted this less as a notification of a job listing and more as a sign that Thunderbird is going to stick around and evolve. That's the difference.
  - jordigh 9y ago
    I see. Those things, except for the popularity, also apply to Mailpile. I guess that's the big difference.
    - tkone 9y ago
      The Mozilla foundation is also a registered 501(c)(3). Is Mailpile? I don't see anything about that on your page?
      - jordigh 9y ago
        No, Mailpile isn't a charity. But the Mozilla foundation isn't the one fronting money for this job, is it? Doesn't that money come from the Mozilla Corporation? Hm, the job ad says that MoFo is the fiscal home, but the candidate will be hired via UpWork. I'm really a bit confused about how money flows around Mozilla.
        9y ago
igorkraw 9y ago
I wonder if they will oxidize(oxidate? rustify) it...
- neilsimp1 9y ago
  They listed C++ in the description, but not Rust. It would be cool if they did do a Rust re-write though. They also mention XUL, which as I understand it isn't part of Firefox any longer.
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    XUL is still part of Firefox and will be for a long time to come. However, add-on authors can't use it any longer.
  - igorkraw 9y ago
    Well, the nice thing is you don't need to rewrite in rust, you can refactor into it slowly
- maltalex 9y ago
  There need to be a very compelling reason to rewrite 7 million lines of code in a different language. The fact that there were enough of those to rewrite Firefox doesn't mean that it makes sense for other projects.
  - igorkraw 9y ago
    As I said to the sibling, the nice thing is you don't need to rewrite in rust, you can refactor into it slowly
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Does that 7 million lines include the browser? I know an email client is a big project but even so that seems a lot.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
ronnier 9y ago
This is good news to hear. I use Thunderbird daily and it's not a pleasant experience.
- davehtaylor 9y ago
  It really needs to have the ability to add arbitrary numbers of physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to a contact in the address book, as well as give each field an arbitrary name. Every other address book on the planet allows this. The fact that it can't makes it unusable for me. It would also be nice to have a proper three vertical pane view. The way it currently works is horrendous.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    >a proper three vertical pane view // What's wrong with View > Layout > Vertical view? Not my preference, just curious what's different as superficially it looks like other such programs.
- smolsky 9y ago
  I've been using Thunderbird for the last 11 years daily at home and at work. Generally, it has been a remarkably stable and pleasant ride. I remember a few bumps around 08..2010 where I ran beta builds because of some bugs. Also, I used to have extensions that colorized patches and highlighted quotes/threads... but those eventually broke and disappeared. So, right now I am running a stock Thunderbird with a few profile customizations that tweak fonts (colors and sizes). Hitting GMail (work) and Fastmail (home) servers every minute or so. Go Thunderbird!
- pmontra 9y ago
  What makes your experience unpleasant? My pain point is that dragging attachments to folders doesn't work in Linux. It's been an open bug since 2007 and I've lost hope on that. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbird/+bug/95507 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbir... Everything else works as it should. I'm not using calendars or syncing address books which probably places me in the long tail of the user distribution.
aniket_ray 9y ago
>The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork (www.upwork.com). Not knowing much about Mozilla, is this the norm there?
- theparanoid 9y ago
  It's a way to be cheap. And honestly hiring through Upwork is a terrible idea.
  - imglorp 9y ago
    Lobsters has a nice little rant on upwork's humiliating experience. https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_hkbxw4 https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_...
    - Cyph0n 9y ago
      I've used Upwork as a freelancer. The last part is false: they never charge transfer fees (at least in the US), and you typically receive funds in 1-2 weeks.
    - GordonS 9y ago
      > For hourly contracts they take random snapshots of your desktop in 10 minutes intervals and they measure your mouse movements and key presses to show your activity I thought you might have been exaggerating, but that truly is utterly absurd! I just can't believe people actually work under such conditions!
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Being cheap is inconsistent with Mozilla's aims, surely? Value for money, yes, but not if it greatly risks employee satisfaction (for example).
- buovjaga 9y ago
  It is the norm for the Foundation, yes. I was thinking of writing to them to let them know about the shady practices of Upwork, discussed in this blog post https://medium.com/@AdShadlabs/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-5c62848bdf46 https://medium.com/@AdShadlabs/why-you-should-never-use-upwo... and its HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773282 Looks like there was a downside to staying with MoFo after all.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Almost certainly not. I imagine it's going to go the same route Firefox went when it dropped XUL.
raverbashing 9y ago
As much as I think the action is commendable I have my questions about the role of an email client in today's market Maybe they should think about how to make a mobile version of it. Still a mail client is a "solved problem". Most of email's problems are behind the client, not on it (like spam control)
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  I'm asking this as a legitimate question. If it's a "solved problem", what's the solution? I'm personally a reluctant Thunderbird user. I use it, I don't mind it all that much, but I can't say it's a delightful experience to use. But it does give me access to my email when I'm offline, and it lets me do GPG for sensitive email.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    If Thunderbird solved your problem there's your solution And I agree, it's not very nice to use But at some point, there isn't much a mail client can do as it's limited by the tech and the stack A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k. Very few people want to pay for a mail client
    - izacus 9y ago
      Meanwhile paid email clients are probably the most successful group of apps on macOS store... But I'm sure you have analytics sources to prove your assertion :)
    - tonyarkles 9y ago
      > And I agree, it's not very nice to use That's... that feels like the road to accepting mediocrity. > A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k. Very few people want to pay for a mail client I fully admit that I drive a '91 Ranger :). I don't know that I call it a solved problem though, because 4WD would be really nice to have in the winter. The mail client thing is interesting re: paying for it though. I guess I technically pay for Outlook as part of my Office 365 subscription, although I don't think much of it. The really hard part for me paying for a mail client is that most of the new paid ones I've seen come out in the last couple years have all been Electron-based, and memory/battery hogs. Outlook's not much better on that front (I think the Mac one, which I use occasionally, idles at about 900MB of RAM). Thunderbird isn't a great solution to my problem. It's just the least bad, and there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to take my money for something better.
martinald 9y ago
I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's mission goals are fantastic but something is going seriously, seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.
- brokensegue 9y ago
  richest charities? not even close? look at ikea.
  - joncrane 9y ago
    How is Ikea a charity?
    - abrowne 9y ago
      IIRC the brand is owned and licensed by a Dutch organization – legally a charity – created by the founder for tax avoidance purposes.
      - orliesaurus 9y ago
        Yeah it's some blackhole of companies holding each other i don't even know how to picture how all this works without pen and paper. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation
    - jonwachob91 9y ago
      Minute MBA has a really good explanation of their set-up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvxRePIv85Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvxRePIv85Y
      - 9y ago
cookiecaper 9y ago
I fully believe that people should be wary of "just rewrite it mentality". However, in this case, when we've had a mostly-dormant Thunderbird for a long time, based on what is now an outmoded development toolkit (the outmoding of which supposedly had a non-trivial amount to do with security) backed by a very complex and large upstream codebase, which is itself in the process of being abandoned for next-gen solutions, is it really wiser to resurrect the old code? I've used Thunderbird off and on since it was announced and I know that it has many advanced features. It's no slouch and I deeply respect that there's still a local mail and news client that somewhat works and sometimes gets a little bit of TLC. But the ecosystem is in shambles, and this is only going to get worse as Firefox diverges. It would obviously take time for a serious revamp to reach parity, but Thunderbird needs a total skeletal reconstruction to pull it off life support and get people excited again. This is just upping the cholesterol meds. All the other "client-side email software" applications in recent memory have been Electron apps. Surely Mozilla can do us one better, and build a revitalized Thunderbird with staying power on an appropriate modern stack? This seems like a great pilot project for a serious Rust-based desktop toolkit.
Supersaiyan_IV 9y ago
Here's how a Corporation like Ericsson fixes Thunderbird to make ends meet: https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar
shmerl 9y ago
I switched to Kmail around the time Mozilla said they stopped actively developing Thunderbird. Is it a change in their attitude?
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Does Kmail have full support for sending html email yet? I stopped using it when the dev response to requests to add it was "email should be text only". Genuine question, I try to audition a new client each year, this year perhaps I'll give Kmail another go?
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Kmail sends HTML just fine.
mconley 9y ago
This title is inaccurate. Mozilla is _not_ hiring a developer to work on Thunderbird full-time. See below: From the post: " The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer! ... Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home. The Thunderbird Council, separate from Mozilla, manages the Project and will direct the software engineer’s work."
- lucideer 9y ago
  Do I understand correctly by interpreting that to mean: "Mozilla is allocating funding to The Thunderbird Project to hire a developer to work on Mozilla Thunderbird" i.e. the distinction is only relevant in terms of the direction of day-to-day work on the project. Or are Mozilla not funding this at all? The following quotes seem to indicate that the distinction isn't really relevant in the context of the hiring process at least: > send us your resume with a cover letter to apply@mozillafoundation.org. > The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork > By applying to this job, you are agreeing to have your applications reviewed [...] by staff members of the Mozilla Foundation.
  - buovjaga 9y ago
    No, the funds are Thunderbird's alone, originating from donations. Mozilla Foundation is just their fiscal home. Thunderbird Council went shopping for a new fiscal home for a while, even considering The Document Foundation, but decided to stay with MoFo: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-fu...
    - lucideer 9y ago
      Good to know. The post really isn't too transparent about this...
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
capt_hotpants 9y ago
Holy moly! Maybe now we can finally have the bug fixed where Thunderbird displays random stuff from the email body in the Inbox tree's From and Date fields (instead of the proper envelope sender and MTA timestamp from the Return-Path and final Received headers). I hope they hire a full-time Firefox developer next. I'm going to upgrade to Quantum (currently my apt-get is holding Firefox 54) as soon as accidentally hitting CTRL-Q instead of CTRL-W on Linux doesn't activate a magical Linux-only hotkey that blows up the whole Firefox browser and looses all of your web-related work.
kuon 9y ago
I now use em client, but I'd love thunderbird interface to evolve to go back to it.
stefantalpalaru 9y ago
> The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork (www.upwork.com). Terrible idea, for a corporation with a revenue of $520,000,000 in 2016[1]. Upwork is extremely humiliating for programmers. For hourly contracts they take random snapshots of your desktop in 10 minutes intervals and they measure your mouse movements and key presses to show your activity, because design doesn't matter, only implementation. Then they take a 2.75% cut from the client, a 20% cut from the freelancer plus extra wire transfer fees when your hard earned funds are available, some 4 weeks later, after they earned interest for Upwork. Then they decided to punish those freelancers who did not upload silly promotional videos on their profiles by forcing them to have video calls for "verification" or get suspended from the platform. Fuck Upwork and fuck Mozilla. --- [1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/02/mozillas-revenue-increased-significantly-in-2016/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/02/mozillas-revenue-increased...
gimmeayrwlt 9y ago
1 fulltime developer ? Sounds like mozilla is very serious about thunderbird I wonder who is this lucky person who gonna rewrite whole app.. I think we need better alternatives
tzs 9y ago
Did Thunderbird ever get the major rewrite that was talked about several years ago? I don't have any details. I just heard they were planning a major rewrite when I reported a bug a long time ago (over 10 years ago) and in the bug tracker the conclusion was that fixing it should be done as part of the major rewrite that was upcoming. For anyone curious, here's the bug (from memory). I had a host with a POP3 mail server running on the normal POP3 port. That host also had a second POP3 mail server on a different port [1]. I tried to set up two email accounts in Thunderbird, one for a POP3 account for user tzs on that host on the standard POP3 port, and the other for tzs on that host on the second port. The second account could not be created because it said that I already had a tzs POP3 account on that host. Thunderbird was using user/host as a unique account key, rather than the more correct user/host/port (or the even more correct user/host/protocol/port). I reported this as a bug, figuring that this would be an easy fix. At worst somewhat tedious but no challenge. Soon someone marked the bug as a possible duplicate, linking to a bug from a couple years earlier that was also due to user/host being assumed unique. In the discussion one of the developers said that the user/host as key assumption was hardwired into the code in too many places, but that was one of the things being redone in the upcoming rewrite. [1] The second server wasn't actually on that host. That host was using an SSH tunnel to make my work POP3 server appear on my LAN.
EGreg 9y ago
Finally, a full time developer on Thuderbird? What was it all thsi time, zero fulltime developers? Embarrassing!
s73ver_ 9y ago
It'd be nice if they mentioned how much the position pays.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I asked around about that, and the consensus was: 'As far as paying contractors, the answer is probably "not enough", since they generally seem to consider "warm fuzzy feelings from working on the Open Web" to be part of compensation".'
ttul 9y ago
IMHO Mozilla is missing out majorly by constraining themselves to the development of open source software, rather than services. With everything moving to the cloud, why doesn’t Mozilla build an awesome email cloud to compete with google but with perhaps better privacy and encryption features? They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non profit”.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non profit”. // AIUI they could locate in the UK and charge as much as they like above the cost price and remain a charity. They couldn't pay shareholders as a charity however.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  So... a ProtonMail clone?
  - ttul 9y ago
    Sure, why not?
    - Ajedi32 9y ago
      Seems like a lot of effort just to recreate something that already exists.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non profit”. Whether or not such charges were only to recover operating costs, they'd probably be treated as “unrelated business income” and thus taxable, at the gross amount, if Mozilla retained it's charity status. It would make more sense to have the non-charity subsidiary do that. Of course, finding the kind of money it would take to go head to head with Google would be a challenge in any case.
DonHopkins 9y ago
The most practical, logical, obvious move would to be to reimplement Thunderbird as an Electron app. But of course that would be untenable for Mozilla because it would be admitting defeat to Chrome. The problem is that Mozilla has no alternative to Electron. There are a number of false starts and head fakes, but none of them have any buy in or support or future.
- wrinkl3 9y ago
  What would it take for Mozilla to build an Electron-like runtime with Firefox?
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    Will, commitment, follow through, etc.
  - AlbertoGP 9y ago
    They tried: "This project is an Electron-compatible app shell for creating desktop apps based on Gecko, the rendering engine used in Firefox." https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron but they failed: "As noted in the blog post Positron Discontinued [1], this project has been discontinued. The source remains available, and you're welcome to reuse it." [1] https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      That's exactly what I meant by false starts and head fakes. In fact, xulrunner was another much earlier attempt at developing an Electron-like platform, but Mozilla's heart just wasn't in it, and they didn't care about or adequately support third party developers who were trying to develop applications with it, like TomTom Home for example (which I worked on). Xulrunner was never meant to be a platform for desktop or embedded apps the way WebKit was -- its singular purpose was to support the desktop version of Firefox. Which is exactly how Thunderbird got into the hopeless dead-end situation it's in right now. Its best move would be to switch to Electron, which is impossible only because of the obvious political reasons. There's no reason to expect Mozilla to ever support any other Electron-like platform any better than they did xulrunner.
AlbertoGP 9y ago
I'm considering applying for this as I use Thunderbird for all my email, wrote a couple of XUL applications years ago, and have an Upwork account, and the first thing I need to do is to see what the source code and build process looks like: I've built Firefox and FirefoxOS before, and it was not trivial. Their post has nothing about that, and the Thunderbird page at Mozilla also has no "Developers", "Source code" or similar link anywhere. That should be there at least in the page footer. Ok, so here is the Mercurial repo and build instructions: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Source_Code/Getting_comm-central https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g... That link should be part of the job description. The directory size (du -sh) is 148 MB after "hg clone", and 5.4 GB after "./client.py checkout".

338 points by azdle 9y ago

With how unrealistic experience expectations can be for positions, It's nice to see they're looking at junior and senior candidates and have this line: B.S. in Computer Science would be lovely, but real-world experience is preferred.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

carussell 9y ago

The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.

tomc1985 9y ago
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! XUL is really cool. Still one of my favorite GUI kits. It is like electron (but actually native!) and had a good reason to be slow (spidermonkey wasn't super fast) :( XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM
- adjagu 9y ago
  I miss the old easter eggs Firefox had. https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...
  - sp332 9y ago
    about:mozilla still works.
    - DrPhish 9y ago
      about:about shows that about:robots still works, at least
      - adjagu 9y ago
        Thank you. I hadn't seen the about:robots page before.
    - cpeterso 9y ago
      and about:robots
      - adjagu 9y ago
        Thank you for this. At least we can hope that Mozilla's version of SkyNet should at least be human friendly.
    - adjagu 9y ago
      Thank you for this. I had forgotten about the about: pages.
- sp332 9y ago
  It's not that XUL was bad, exactly. But priorities have changed to security, battery life, and multi-threaded performance. The weight of XUL cruft that has built up over time was holding the project back.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    Do you think using XML external entities declared in DTD files for localization was a good idea? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Localization https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu...
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  How was XPCOM better than MS COM? Feature set? Nope. Tooling? Nope. Language support? Nope. Ecosystem? Nope. OLE components? Nope. Distributed COM? Nope. Doesn't trigger knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reactionaries even though it's a shallow clone of Microsoft technology? Check. Did you know that "decomification" was a word? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194385 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194385
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    XPCOM was better mainly because it was Mozilla docs instead of Microsoft. I was doing MS COM in a previous job and I swear MSDN is written in sanskrit
taf2 9y ago
I have fond memories of XPCOM and XUL... Back in 04 we had a desktop application mostly a collection of C++ bindings to the Firebird database and for silly reasons I started the GUI with Gtk+ but as we continued to struggle with porting to Win32 (like we sell this to people in Win32 not Linux) and I started to find a need to embed web content (cause like we should have written the whole thing as a web app - native apps are silly). I recall hacking the event loop to get Gtk+ and gecko to play nice in Win32. Anyways, XPCOM allowing me to write IDL files and expose my C++ work as JavaScript was at the time amazing and allowed me to quickly rewrite most of the UI in XUL and keep all the SQL work we'd done such that if I recall correctly we were able to port the application some 500k lines of code over to XUL. This was right before XulRunner... I still to this day feel good things about IDL/XPCOM and XUL for converting to see the light with JavaScript and HTML. XUL is just like a basically less well supported version of HTML and so is that MS markup language and event Gtk+'s Glade is just an XML editor for a UI... I beleive even OSX via xcode has an underlying XML format to describe the UI... and IMO HTML is light years ahead for UI.
- tzahola 9y ago
  > and IMO HTML is light years ahead for UI LOL. Last time I checked you still couldn't make an image fill the available space while keeping its aspect ratio :D
  - Cyberdog 9y ago
    img { width: 100%; height: auto; }
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      That won't work right; it can overflow vertically. Consider the case of a 10x10 image in a container of width 500px and height 100px... Ideally you would want it to end up 100x100, but it will end up 500x500 with that CSS.
      - mikewhy 9y ago
kylehotchkiss 9y ago
Sweeeeeeet. Maybe they'll be competitive with Mail.app. if they could match the speed and design of new Firefox, and support loading a bigger set of past emails than Mail.app can without performance issues, i'd love to use Thunderbird.
dlandis 9y ago
> The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. Well it is only a six month contract for a single developer.
- carussell 9y ago
  Sure, but the big thing is the "serious" part. We're basically talking about the patch paradox[1]. At any point in time, someone could have stepped up and made it known they were willing to do the necessary work to move off XUL. But without a similar commitment from upstream to accept a future involving a mail client built on web standard tech, it would be a wasted effort. Heck, Nylas even built their own such email client, relicensed it to a compatible license (GPL -> MIT), reached out to say, "please use this" and ask how they could help, and still nothing happened. 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2017/08/06/contributors-dilemma.html https://www.colbyrussell.com/2017/08/06/contributors-dilemma...
  - nirv 9y ago
    There're many decent web-based proprietary mail solutions, and I was really excited once Nylas Mail showed up, even though it's Electron-based. And then instantly disappointed by its license. Later, I was considering switching to Nylas Mail when they re-licensed their open-source client, but turned out by "please use this" they still require you to opt-in with Nylas Identity tied to Nylas Cloud[1] They could only help replace free (from mail vendors) Thunderbird, playing by the rules of the Thunderbird. [1] https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/3484 https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/3484
    - carussell 9y ago
      > but turned out by "please use this" they still require you to opt-in with Nylas Identity tied to Nylas Cloud We're talking about Thunderbird development. When I wrote that they changed to a compatible license and reached out to say "please use this", that's not referring to their attempt to get users. That's a reference to their attempt to donate their code and energy towards improving Thunderbird. > They could only help replace free (from mail vendors) Thunderbird, playing by the rules of the Thunderbird. Huh?

tambourine_man 9y ago

7 million lines of code, Windows, Mac and Linux support… looks a lot of work for a single person.

AngeloAnolin 9y ago
There is likely a team working on this. The job posting said for someone to come on board. And yes, hiring a single developer to work all alone by himself would be akin to killing the project itself as just understanding the codebase, design, technology and architecture would be too much for one person to handle. We’re looking for an amazing developer to come on board to help make Thunderbird the best Email client on the planet!
- sp332 9y ago
  Thunderbird was moved to "community development" with Mozilla providing only stability and security updates. https://web.archive.org/web/20161003075603/https://blog.mozilla.org/beyond-the-code/2012/07/09/about-the-future-of-thunderbird/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161003075603/https://blog.mozi... In the interview it says that employees might only work on the project part-time.
digi_owl 9y ago
Quite a bit of that code was shared between Thunderbird, Firefox and Seamonkey. But now Firefox don't want to play along any more, and dragging the other two along for the ride...

jordigh 9y ago

Huh, I was going to post this story, but I thought it was not allowed because it's a job posting and I had to wait until the Who is Hiring thread. So, if posting jobs for working on free applications is ok outside of Who Is Hiring, let me try to advertise this job for another free email client, Mailpile, which got killed when I tried to post it earlier: https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/ https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/ I currently use Evolution for email, which is ok and I've gotten used to its limitations, but I would love a more modern client! Edit: I guess it's not ok. I'm confused.

FroshKiller 9y ago
Thunderbird is a popular mail client that has at times had a pretty uncertain future. I imagine that azdle posted this less as a notification of a job listing and more as a sign that Thunderbird is going to stick around and evolve. That's the difference.
- jordigh 9y ago
  I see. Those things, except for the popularity, also apply to Mailpile. I guess that's the big difference.
  - tkone 9y ago
    The Mozilla foundation is also a registered 501(c)(3). Is Mailpile? I don't see anything about that on your page?
    - jordigh 9y ago
      No, Mailpile isn't a charity. But the Mozilla foundation isn't the one fronting money for this job, is it? Doesn't that money come from the Mozilla Corporation? Hm, the job ad says that MoFo is the fiscal home, but the candidate will be hired via UpWork. I'm really a bit confused about how money flows around Mozilla.
      - 9y ago

igorkraw 9y ago

I wonder if they will oxidize(oxidate? rustify) it...

neilsimp1 9y ago
They listed C++ in the description, but not Rust. It would be cool if they did do a Rust re-write though. They also mention XUL, which as I understand it isn't part of Firefox any longer.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  XUL is still part of Firefox and will be for a long time to come. However, add-on authors can't use it any longer.
- igorkraw 9y ago
  Well, the nice thing is you don't need to rewrite in rust, you can refactor into it slowly
maltalex 9y ago
There need to be a very compelling reason to rewrite 7 million lines of code in a different language. The fact that there were enough of those to rewrite Firefox doesn't mean that it makes sense for other projects.
- igorkraw 9y ago
  As I said to the sibling, the nice thing is you don't need to rewrite in rust, you can refactor into it slowly
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Does that 7 million lines include the browser? I know an email client is a big project but even so that seems a lot.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

ronnier 9y ago

This is good news to hear. I use Thunderbird daily and it's not a pleasant experience.

davehtaylor 9y ago
It really needs to have the ability to add arbitrary numbers of physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to a contact in the address book, as well as give each field an arbitrary name. Every other address book on the planet allows this. The fact that it can't makes it unusable for me. It would also be nice to have a proper three vertical pane view. The way it currently works is horrendous.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >a proper three vertical pane view // What's wrong with View > Layout > Vertical view? Not my preference, just curious what's different as superficially it looks like other such programs.
smolsky 9y ago
I've been using Thunderbird for the last 11 years daily at home and at work. Generally, it has been a remarkably stable and pleasant ride. I remember a few bumps around 08..2010 where I ran beta builds because of some bugs. Also, I used to have extensions that colorized patches and highlighted quotes/threads... but those eventually broke and disappeared. So, right now I am running a stock Thunderbird with a few profile customizations that tweak fonts (colors and sizes). Hitting GMail (work) and Fastmail (home) servers every minute or so. Go Thunderbird!
pmontra 9y ago
What makes your experience unpleasant? My pain point is that dragging attachments to folders doesn't work in Linux. It's been an open bug since 2007 and I've lost hope on that. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbird/+bug/95507 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbir... Everything else works as it should. I'm not using calendars or syncing address books which probably places me in the long tail of the user distribution.

aniket_ray 9y ago

>The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork (www.upwork.com). Not knowing much about Mozilla, is this the norm there?

theparanoid 9y ago
It's a way to be cheap. And honestly hiring through Upwork is a terrible idea.
- imglorp 9y ago
  Lobsters has a nice little rant on upwork's humiliating experience. https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_hkbxw4 https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_...
  - Cyph0n 9y ago
    I've used Upwork as a freelancer. The last part is false: they never charge transfer fees (at least in the US), and you typically receive funds in 1-2 weeks.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    > For hourly contracts they take random snapshots of your desktop in 10 minutes intervals and they measure your mouse movements and key presses to show your activity I thought you might have been exaggerating, but that truly is utterly absurd! I just can't believe people actually work under such conditions!
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Being cheap is inconsistent with Mozilla's aims, surely? Value for money, yes, but not if it greatly risks employee satisfaction (for example).
buovjaga 9y ago
It is the norm for the Foundation, yes. I was thinking of writing to them to let them know about the shady practices of Upwork, discussed in this blog post https://medium.com/@AdShadlabs/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-5c62848bdf46 https://medium.com/@AdShadlabs/why-you-should-never-use-upwo... and its HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773282 Looks like there was a downside to staying with MoFo after all.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Almost certainly not. I imagine it's going to go the same route Firefox went when it dropped XUL.

raverbashing 9y ago

As much as I think the action is commendable I have my questions about the role of an email client in today's market Maybe they should think about how to make a mobile version of it. Still a mail client is a "solved problem". Most of email's problems are behind the client, not on it (like spam control)

tonyarkles 9y ago
I'm asking this as a legitimate question. If it's a "solved problem", what's the solution? I'm personally a reluctant Thunderbird user. I use it, I don't mind it all that much, but I can't say it's a delightful experience to use. But it does give me access to my email when I'm offline, and it lets me do GPG for sensitive email.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  If Thunderbird solved your problem there's your solution And I agree, it's not very nice to use But at some point, there isn't much a mail client can do as it's limited by the tech and the stack A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k. Very few people want to pay for a mail client
  - izacus 9y ago
    Meanwhile paid email clients are probably the most successful group of apps on macOS store... But I'm sure you have analytics sources to prove your assertion :)
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    > And I agree, it's not very nice to use That's... that feels like the road to accepting mediocrity. > A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k. Very few people want to pay for a mail client I fully admit that I drive a '91 Ranger :). I don't know that I call it a solved problem though, because 4WD would be really nice to have in the winter. The mail client thing is interesting re: paying for it though. I guess I technically pay for Outlook as part of my Office 365 subscription, although I don't think much of it. The really hard part for me paying for a mail client is that most of the new paid ones I've seen come out in the last couple years have all been Electron-based, and memory/battery hogs. Outlook's not much better on that front (I think the Mac one, which I use occasionally, idles at about 900MB of RAM). Thunderbird isn't a great solution to my problem. It's just the least bad, and there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to take my money for something better.

martinald 9y ago

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's mission goals are fantastic but something is going seriously, seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.

brokensegue 9y ago
richest charities? not even close? look at ikea.
- joncrane 9y ago
  How is Ikea a charity?
  - abrowne 9y ago
    IIRC the brand is owned and licensed by a Dutch organization – legally a charity – created by the founder for tax avoidance purposes.
    - orliesaurus 9y ago
      Yeah it's some blackhole of companies holding each other i don't even know how to picture how all this works without pen and paper. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation
  - jonwachob91 9y ago
    Minute MBA has a really good explanation of their set-up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvxRePIv85Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvxRePIv85Y
    - 9y ago

cookiecaper 9y ago

I fully believe that people should be wary of "just rewrite it mentality". However, in this case, when we've had a mostly-dormant Thunderbird for a long time, based on what is now an outmoded development toolkit (the outmoding of which supposedly had a non-trivial amount to do with security) backed by a very complex and large upstream codebase, which is itself in the process of being abandoned for next-gen solutions, is it really wiser to resurrect the old code? I've used Thunderbird off and on since it was announced and I know that it has many advanced features. It's no slouch and I deeply respect that there's still a local mail and news client that somewhat works and sometimes gets a little bit of TLC. But the ecosystem is in shambles, and this is only going to get worse as Firefox diverges. It would obviously take time for a serious revamp to reach parity, but Thunderbird needs a total skeletal reconstruction to pull it off life support and get people excited again. This is just upping the cholesterol meds. All the other "client-side email software" applications in recent memory have been Electron apps. Surely Mozilla can do us one better, and build a revitalized Thunderbird with staying power on an appropriate modern stack? This seems like a great pilot project for a serious Rust-based desktop toolkit.

Supersaiyan_IV 9y ago

Here's how a Corporation like Ericsson fixes Thunderbird to make ends meet: https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar

shmerl 9y ago

I switched to Kmail around the time Mozilla said they stopped actively developing Thunderbird. Is it a change in their attitude?

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Does Kmail have full support for sending html email yet? I stopped using it when the dev response to requests to add it was "email should be text only". Genuine question, I try to audition a new client each year, this year perhaps I'll give Kmail another go?
- shmerl 9y ago
  Kmail sends HTML just fine.

mconley 9y ago

This title is inaccurate. Mozilla is _not_ hiring a developer to work on Thunderbird full-time. See below: From the post: " The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer! ... Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home. The Thunderbird Council, separate from Mozilla, manages the Project and will direct the software engineer’s work."

lucideer 9y ago
Do I understand correctly by interpreting that to mean: "Mozilla is allocating funding to The Thunderbird Project to hire a developer to work on Mozilla Thunderbird" i.e. the distinction is only relevant in terms of the direction of day-to-day work on the project. Or are Mozilla not funding this at all? The following quotes seem to indicate that the distinction isn't really relevant in the context of the hiring process at least: > send us your resume with a cover letter to apply@mozillafoundation.org. > The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork > By applying to this job, you are agreeing to have your applications reviewed [...] by staff members of the Mozilla Foundation.
- buovjaga 9y ago
  No, the funds are Thunderbird's alone, originating from donations. Mozilla Foundation is just their fiscal home. Thunderbird Council went shopping for a new fiscal home for a while, even considering The Document Foundation, but decided to stay with MoFo: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-fu...
  - lucideer 9y ago
    Good to know. The post really isn't too transparent about this...
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago

capt_hotpants 9y ago

Holy moly! Maybe now we can finally have the bug fixed where Thunderbird displays random stuff from the email body in the Inbox tree's From and Date fields (instead of the proper envelope sender and MTA timestamp from the Return-Path and final Received headers). I hope they hire a full-time Firefox developer next. I'm going to upgrade to Quantum (currently my apt-get is holding Firefox 54) as soon as accidentally hitting CTRL-Q instead of CTRL-W on Linux doesn't activate a magical Linux-only hotkey that blows up the whole Firefox browser and looses all of your web-related work.

kuon 9y ago

I now use em client, but I'd love thunderbird interface to evolve to go back to it.

stefantalpalaru 9y ago

> The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork (www.upwork.com). Terrible idea, for a corporation with a revenue of $520,000,000 in 2016[1]. Upwork is extremely humiliating for programmers. For hourly contracts they take random snapshots of your desktop in 10 minutes intervals and they measure your mouse movements and key presses to show your activity, because design doesn't matter, only implementation. Then they take a 2.75% cut from the client, a 20% cut from the freelancer plus extra wire transfer fees when your hard earned funds are available, some 4 weeks later, after they earned interest for Upwork. Then they decided to punish those freelancers who did not upload silly promotional videos on their profiles by forcing them to have video calls for "verification" or get suspended from the platform. Fuck Upwork and fuck Mozilla. --- [1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/02/mozillas-revenue-increased-significantly-in-2016/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/02/mozillas-revenue-increased...

gimmeayrwlt 9y ago

1 fulltime developer ? Sounds like mozilla is very serious about thunderbird I wonder who is this lucky person who gonna rewrite whole app.. I think we need better alternatives

tzs 9y ago

Did Thunderbird ever get the major rewrite that was talked about several years ago? I don't have any details. I just heard they were planning a major rewrite when I reported a bug a long time ago (over 10 years ago) and in the bug tracker the conclusion was that fixing it should be done as part of the major rewrite that was upcoming. For anyone curious, here's the bug (from memory). I had a host with a POP3 mail server running on the normal POP3 port. That host also had a second POP3 mail server on a different port [1]. I tried to set up two email accounts in Thunderbird, one for a POP3 account for user tzs on that host on the standard POP3 port, and the other for tzs on that host on the second port. The second account could not be created because it said that I already had a tzs POP3 account on that host. Thunderbird was using user/host as a unique account key, rather than the more correct user/host/port (or the even more correct user/host/protocol/port). I reported this as a bug, figuring that this would be an easy fix. At worst somewhat tedious but no challenge. Soon someone marked the bug as a possible duplicate, linking to a bug from a couple years earlier that was also due to user/host being assumed unique. In the discussion one of the developers said that the user/host as key assumption was hardwired into the code in too many places, but that was one of the things being redone in the upcoming rewrite. [1] The second server wasn't actually on that host. That host was using an SSH tunnel to make my work POP3 server appear on my LAN.

EGreg 9y ago

Finally, a full time developer on Thuderbird? What was it all thsi time, zero fulltime developers? Embarrassing!

s73ver_ 9y ago

It'd be nice if they mentioned how much the position pays.

DonHopkins 9y ago
I asked around about that, and the consensus was: 'As far as paying contractors, the answer is probably "not enough", since they generally seem to consider "warm fuzzy feelings from working on the Open Web" to be part of compensation".'

ttul 9y ago

IMHO Mozilla is missing out majorly by constraining themselves to the development of open source software, rather than services. With everything moving to the cloud, why doesn’t Mozilla build an awesome email cloud to compete with google but with perhaps better privacy and encryption features? They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non profit”.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non profit”. // AIUI they could locate in the UK and charge as much as they like above the cost price and remain a charity. They couldn't pay shareholders as a charity however.
Ajedi32 9y ago
So... a ProtonMail clone?
- ttul 9y ago
  Sure, why not?
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    Seems like a lot of effort just to recreate something that already exists.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non profit”. Whether or not such charges were only to recover operating costs, they'd probably be treated as “unrelated business income” and thus taxable, at the gross amount, if Mozilla retained it's charity status. It would make more sense to have the non-charity subsidiary do that. Of course, finding the kind of money it would take to go head to head with Google would be a challenge in any case.

DonHopkins 9y ago

The most practical, logical, obvious move would to be to reimplement Thunderbird as an Electron app. But of course that would be untenable for Mozilla because it would be admitting defeat to Chrome. The problem is that Mozilla has no alternative to Electron. There are a number of false starts and head fakes, but none of them have any buy in or support or future.

wrinkl3 9y ago
What would it take for Mozilla to build an Electron-like runtime with Firefox?
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  Will, commitment, follow through, etc.
- AlbertoGP 9y ago
  They tried: "This project is an Electron-compatible app shell for creating desktop apps based on Gecko, the rendering engine used in Firefox." https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron but they failed: "As noted in the blog post Positron Discontinued [1], this project has been discontinued. The source remains available, and you're welcome to reuse it." [1] https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    That's exactly what I meant by false starts and head fakes. In fact, xulrunner was another much earlier attempt at developing an Electron-like platform, but Mozilla's heart just wasn't in it, and they didn't care about or adequately support third party developers who were trying to develop applications with it, like TomTom Home for example (which I worked on). Xulrunner was never meant to be a platform for desktop or embedded apps the way WebKit was -- its singular purpose was to support the desktop version of Firefox. Which is exactly how Thunderbird got into the hopeless dead-end situation it's in right now. Its best move would be to switch to Electron, which is impossible only because of the obvious political reasons. There's no reason to expect Mozilla to ever support any other Electron-like platform any better than they did xulrunner.

AlbertoGP 9y ago

I'm considering applying for this as I use Thunderbird for all my email, wrote a couple of XUL applications years ago, and have an Upwork account, and the first thing I need to do is to see what the source code and build process looks like: I've built Firefox and FirefoxOS before, and it was not trivial. Their post has nothing about that, and the Thunderbird page at Mozilla also has no "Developers", "Source code" or similar link anywhere. That should be there at least in the page footer. Ok, so here is the Mercurial repo and build instructions: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Source_Code/Getting_comm-central https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g... That link should be part of the job description. The directory size (du -sh) is 148 MB after "hg clone", and 5.4 GB after "./client.py checkout".