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Desktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this. I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly require
by confounded 9y ago
Desktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this.
I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native clients.
I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in reality I hardly ever use them.
Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have their sights on, I can certainly see why it's lower priority.
- izacus 9y agoWell good thing your personal experience translates to all other 25 million people using Thunderbird.
- confounded 9y agoWe don't have data, but Mozilla probably do. In lieu we can only guess based on our experiences.
- bhauer 9y agoI don't want to discount your experience and preferences. I hear and understand that you are using desktop email less frequently. I use desktop email extensively, and I suspect others do as well. I do not know where Mozilla sourced the metric of "25 million users," but let's assume it is within the right order of magnitude. Even if that number is projected to fall, it's sufficient to warrant significant resource investment. I'd argue, as I did above, that the mission statement of Mozilla aligns well with email, so from my perspective a healthy full-time development team seems reasonable for this product category. I don't want Mozilla ceding desktop email as it did desktop browsing; and I especially don't want Mozilla by way of inaction helping cede email generally to centralized alternatives. Your concern about desktop clients is an echo of Mozilla's challenge with web browsers—namely, they can't achieve a solid foothold on mobile because mobile is (currently) a walled garden. Until that is sorted out, Mozilla should redouble effort in the desktop space, where it is strongest. But for whatever it's worth, having not yet seen something like PAO [1] from Microsoft, I would love to see Mozilla move in that direction. [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
- jasonkostempski 9y agoIf MS contiues the way they are going, anyone stuck using Outlook web client and has to do anything mildly advanced, like copy text, will be seeking out a desktop client.
- hunter2_ 9y agoI use native Outlook on my Mac for work, connected to an Office 365 mailbox, and whenever I change my password, native Outlook pops up a little webview (instead of native username/password widgets) with our ADFS SAML flow [0]. We use Duo Security as our MFA solution on another SAML IdP we have (not ADFS, but Shibboleth), and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work within that Outlook webview in the event that we hooked it all up [1]. We also use some native Android/iOS apps (vendor apps, not in-house) where users log in with SAML, and thus could use Duo MFA. TL;DR: web-based authentication is not just for full-fledged browsers that users type URLs into. [0] https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2015/11/19/updated-office-365-modern-authentication-public-preview/ https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2015/11/19/updated-office-365... [1] https://duo.com/docs/adfs-30 https://duo.com/docs/adfs-30
- hobofan 9y agoWho says that Thunderbird can't become a mobile app too? Given more developer power, of course.
- peternicky 9y agoThis is your experience, certainly not representative of any meaningful trends.