3 ms·

Does anyone have the inside story to what happened that caused Thunderbird to stop being developed in the first place, and what led to its development being pic

Does anyone have the inside story to what happened that caused Thunderbird to stop being developed in the first place, and what led to its development being picked back up again? It's not really clear what happened in either case to me.

saulrh 7y ago
Wild-ass guess: Some enterprise user determined that quietly funding it would cost less than rebuilding some bit of internal tooling that depended on it. (cunningham, cunningham, cunningham, come forth and correct me!)
ttul 7y ago
Mozilla Corp - which owns the Thunderbird project - decided to focus resources on the browser project and away from peripheral software projects like Thunderbird that were fading in usage and couldn't reasonably be seen to make a difference out in the world. In my humble opinion, Mozilla _should_ fund an open-source front end to the various cloud email hosting services.
- Rondom 7y ago
  I faintly remember that usage was actually growing when Mozilla took the decision to not invest further in Thunderbird. Of course, in proportion, most people used webmail, I guess. Some (very) quick internet search reveals the blog post linked below. Cannot remember if that coincides with the time the decision was made, though... https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-continues-to-grow/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...
  - ttul 7y ago
    Perhaps “fading is usage” is inaccurate!
hsivonen 7y ago
Since there were others interested in continued development, Thunderbird development didn't stop when Mozilla Corporation decided to scale down its level of support for the project. After a new way of arranging funding was set up (through Mozilla Foundation), there has been more visibility of development. (I don't know of actual metrics of development activity over time.)
newscracker 7y ago
Well, this is not the inside story, but what is known publicly. I'm just copy pasting from the Wikipedia article on Mozilla Thunderbird [1] since it has all the details with citations. Basically, Mozilla believed that email was a solved problem that didn't need attention while Firefox OS and others needed more attention. The code sharing between Firefox and Thunderbird also made management of change more cumbersome (it's still difficult on the Thunderbird side now, though it's better than how it was a few years ago). > On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new development model shifted to Mozilla offering only "Extended Support Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing the community to take over the development of new features. > On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chair Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird development needs to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird developers spending large efforts responding to changes to Mozilla technologies, while Firefox was paying a tax to support Thunderbird development. She also said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does. At the same time, it was announced that Mozilla Foundation will provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project. > Since the memo in 2015, Mozilla has brought Thunderbird back in-house in an announcement on May 9, 2017, and continues to support its development. The Thunderbird development team has also expanded by adding several new members and has undergone an overhaul on security and user-interface. You could also take a look at the Thunderbird Council email archives (requires a login) [2] and the Thunderbird Engineering Council email archives (high posting volume). [3] P.S.: I donate money to the Thunderbird project. Anyone who wishes to help out could send a little money solely dedicated to Thunderbird. [4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird [2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/thunderbird-council https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/thunderbird-council [3]: https://lists.thunderbird.net/mailman/listinfo/maildev_lists.thunderbird.net https://lists.thunderbird.net/mailman/listinfo/maildev_lists... [4]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
jcranmer 7y ago
Thunderbird was always the lesser entity within the Mozilla infrastructure, and there have long been influential engineers within the core Gecko development cohort who did not think that Gecko engineers should be attempting to do anything to support Thunderbird. (Of course, there were other engineers who would happily write the patches themselves to fix Thunderbird if informed they broke it, so this is by no means a universal opinion within Mozilla). In and around 2012, Mozilla was deeply terrified of its sliding market share and felt that the best way forward was to move into the mobile market. The initial XUL-based Firefox for Android proved to be a veritable resource hog, which made Mozilla push a lot harder and faster both in ending its support for XUL, and in revamping its browser engine to work a lot better at mobile devices. One of the results of this effort was the attempt to make a mobile OS, running on the most pitiful smartphones, that would use Gecko as its main application environment. Thunderbird, being a large, featureful, monolithic application with a 15-year-old codebase [1], was (and still is) not really suitable for use on a mobile operating system, and it's probably easier to rewrite the code from scratch than to attempt to modify it for use on mobile devices. The then-CEO (his name escapes me at the moment) of Mozilla in 2011 was a big advocate of the push to mobile, and continuing support for Thunderbird was the sort of distraction that looks like a big cost that it couldn't afford in a time of crisis. So it's not surprising that they decided to stop paid development, although the announcement came as a shock to the people working on it: one person had been hired with the expectation that he would soon be leading a time of people, only to find that he would become the sole paid engineer on the codebase. Originally, when Mozilla made the announcement, they promised that there would be a skeleton crew that would do minimal maintenance of the project. A developer, release engineer, QA person, and a build engineer if I recall all the roles correctly. Over the next few years, the people who were still doing paid development were essentially told to stop working on Thunderbird stuff, so that even the skeleton crew promised proved not to last long. In the meantime, though, several community members (myself included) were providing most of the legwork to actually maintain the project. One of the other things that Mozilla promised was that money donated specifically for Thunderbird would remain in a pool that could only be used for Thunderbird. It took a few years for the community (many thanks especially to rkent's efforts in actually getting this to happen) to actually get access to these finances, but by around 2017, we were able to finally start getting contracts for people to actually work on Thunderbird on a paid basis. There's actually no contribution from Mozilla, except for the free hosting it provides as well as the time that core Gecko developers are willing to spend on contributing to Thunderbird. [1] In terms of oldest Mozilla code still in active use, Thunderbird has some contenders. There are several pieces that are essentially unchanged from the public CVS 1.1 revision in 1999, and some code I found that is substantially similar to the Netscape Classic code once on MXR--I don't know if that was the 4.x version or the abandoned 5.x version. Some comments in libmime have a date in 1997.

saulrh 7y ago

Wild-ass guess: Some enterprise user determined that quietly funding it would cost less than rebuilding some bit of internal tooling that depended on it. (cunningham, cunningham, cunningham, come forth and correct me!)

ttul 7y ago

Mozilla Corp - which owns the Thunderbird project - decided to focus resources on the browser project and away from peripheral software projects like Thunderbird that were fading in usage and couldn't reasonably be seen to make a difference out in the world. In my humble opinion, Mozilla _should_ fund an open-source front end to the various cloud email hosting services.

Rondom 7y ago
I faintly remember that usage was actually growing when Mozilla took the decision to not invest further in Thunderbird. Of course, in proportion, most people used webmail, I guess. Some (very) quick internet search reveals the blog post linked below. Cannot remember if that coincides with the time the decision was made, though... https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-continues-to-grow/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...
- ttul 7y ago
  Perhaps “fading is usage” is inaccurate!

hsivonen 7y ago

Since there were others interested in continued development, Thunderbird development didn't stop when Mozilla Corporation decided to scale down its level of support for the project. After a new way of arranging funding was set up (through Mozilla Foundation), there has been more visibility of development. (I don't know of actual metrics of development activity over time.)

newscracker 7y ago

Well, this is not the inside story, but what is known publicly. I'm just copy pasting from the Wikipedia article on Mozilla Thunderbird [1] since it has all the details with citations. Basically, Mozilla believed that email was a solved problem that didn't need attention while Firefox OS and others needed more attention. The code sharing between Firefox and Thunderbird also made management of change more cumbersome (it's still difficult on the Thunderbird side now, though it's better than how it was a few years ago). > On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new development model shifted to Mozilla offering only "Extended Support Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing the community to take over the development of new features. > On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chair Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird development needs to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird developers spending large efforts responding to changes to Mozilla technologies, while Firefox was paying a tax to support Thunderbird development. She also said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does. At the same time, it was announced that Mozilla Foundation will provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project. > Since the memo in 2015, Mozilla has brought Thunderbird back in-house in an announcement on May 9, 2017, and continues to support its development. The Thunderbird development team has also expanded by adding several new members and has undergone an overhaul on security and user-interface. You could also take a look at the Thunderbird Council email archives (requires a login) [2] and the Thunderbird Engineering Council email archives (high posting volume). [3] P.S.: I donate money to the Thunderbird project. Anyone who wishes to help out could send a little money solely dedicated to Thunderbird. [4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird [2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/thunderbird-council https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/thunderbird-council [3]: https://lists.thunderbird.net/mailman/listinfo/maildev_lists.thunderbird.net https://lists.thunderbird.net/mailman/listinfo/maildev_lists... [4]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

jcranmer 7y ago

Thunderbird was always the lesser entity within the Mozilla infrastructure, and there have long been influential engineers within the core Gecko development cohort who did not think that Gecko engineers should be attempting to do anything to support Thunderbird. (Of course, there were other engineers who would happily write the patches themselves to fix Thunderbird if informed they broke it, so this is by no means a universal opinion within Mozilla). In and around 2012, Mozilla was deeply terrified of its sliding market share and felt that the best way forward was to move into the mobile market. The initial XUL-based Firefox for Android proved to be a veritable resource hog, which made Mozilla push a lot harder and faster both in ending its support for XUL, and in revamping its browser engine to work a lot better at mobile devices. One of the results of this effort was the attempt to make a mobile OS, running on the most pitiful smartphones, that would use Gecko as its main application environment. Thunderbird, being a large, featureful, monolithic application with a 15-year-old codebase [1], was (and still is) not really suitable for use on a mobile operating system, and it's probably easier to rewrite the code from scratch than to attempt to modify it for use on mobile devices. The then-CEO (his name escapes me at the moment) of Mozilla in 2011 was a big advocate of the push to mobile, and continuing support for Thunderbird was the sort of distraction that looks like a big cost that it couldn't afford in a time of crisis. So it's not surprising that they decided to stop paid development, although the announcement came as a shock to the people working on it: one person had been hired with the expectation that he would soon be leading a time of people, only to find that he would become the sole paid engineer on the codebase. Originally, when Mozilla made the announcement, they promised that there would be a skeleton crew that would do minimal maintenance of the project. A developer, release engineer, QA person, and a build engineer if I recall all the roles correctly. Over the next few years, the people who were still doing paid development were essentially told to stop working on Thunderbird stuff, so that even the skeleton crew promised proved not to last long. In the meantime, though, several community members (myself included) were providing most of the legwork to actually maintain the project. One of the other things that Mozilla promised was that money donated specifically for Thunderbird would remain in a pool that could only be used for Thunderbird. It took a few years for the community (many thanks especially to rkent's efforts in actually getting this to happen) to actually get access to these finances, but by around 2017, we were able to finally start getting contracts for people to actually work on Thunderbird on a paid basis. There's actually no contribution from Mozilla, except for the free hosting it provides as well as the time that core Gecko developers are willing to spend on contributing to Thunderbird. [1] In terms of oldest Mozilla code still in active use, Thunderbird has some contenders. There are several pieces that are essentially unchanged from the public CVS 1.1 revision in 1999, and some code I found that is substantially similar to the Netscape Classic code once on MXR--I don't know if that was the 4.x version or the abandoned 5.x version. Some comments in libmime have a date in 1997.