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> Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom

> Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface. There's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!

s3p 4y ago
I'll take this over an Electron app any day :) love FF
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  I thought that Thunderbird was a native application for quite a long time. For some reason it never had the same icky feeling I get from any Electron application (even supposedly "high quality" ones) and worked fast on crappy machines (which is what I've typically used throughout the life). Of course, performance went a bit downhill since they abandoned XUL in favor of pure HTML, but still.
- layer8 4y ago
  Reading the article, I was expecting the dreaded “and we’re rebuilding it on Electron” (because apparently that’s the only way anyone knows to build a desktop app nowadays), but apparently they don’t plan to move to an entirely different technical base, just to rewrite stuff.
  - jeltz 4y ago
    No, because they have already done that (except on Firefox instead of Chromium).
    - layer8 4y ago
      Do they use JavaScript outside the UI?
      - tredre3 4y ago
        The SMTP client is now written in javascript and most of the IMAP client as well. The whole calendaring system is written in javascript. The chat clients (irc, matrix, etc) are also written in javascript.
        layer8 4y ago
        Okay, so not that dissimilar to an Electron stack after all.