Mozilla Thunderbird Love
Brad and I are heavy Thunderbird users. It’s been my exclusive e-mail client for home and business since it was originally spun out from the Mozilla Suite as a standalone product. All this time I’ve been waiting for the day when Thunderbird would take to the skies.
Late last month wheels began moving at Mozilla to get Thunderbird ready for that takeoff. Three options were put on the table. All of them pertained to giving Thunderbird the love it’s been in need of both from Mozilla leadership and from the open source community.
Throwing in our Hat
While we’re an incredibly small player by comparison to those who have contributed code and funds to the Thunderbird project, we do what we can by promoting Thunderbird to all of our clients, friends, and family–many of whom have eagerly switched to Thunderbird from Outlook and various webmail clients.
What I’d like to contribute now are a few ideas. As Thunderbird takes off, I’d like to contribute more tangible items. But for now, some thoughts.
Mozilla’s Mission
As Mitchell Baker, the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, mentioned in her post regarding Thunderbird and the Mozilla Mission, Mozilla’s mission is much broader than just building a great web browser. A quick read through the Principles section of the Mozilla Manifesto will highlight the Foundation’s focus on keeping the Internet open, decentralized, and public. As Ms. Baker presented in her post, Firefox is the project that best fulfills those goals. However, behind Firefox is a “product” that Mozilla could leverage to more completely accomplish its mission.
Mozilla the Platform
The Mozilla Platform is an often used title for a yet-to-be product made up of several toolkits, run time environments, and specifications used in the Mozilla products. Work has been done in this area with the creation of XULRunner, but Mozilla’s stated goals for it are still very Firefox centric. The idea of a general use platform for its products and other XUL-based products is still taking a back seat to Firefox.
Ms. Baker states that Firefox “is the closest thing there is to a universal [Internet] client.†A great amount of information and an increasing number of applications have moved to the Web, but not all information and applications are available via a browser. Most of those simply use the browser as a platform in itself, and often work in spite of the limitations of the browser. The number of web service enabled sites also continues to increase. These services often give rise to non-browser-based methods of accessing their data.
Rich Internet Applications
Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are an excellent example. Over the past several months the idea of Desktop-based, web-enabled RIA’s has become common in discussion of the future of the web. Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and Microsoft are all active players in this arena, but when you read about this movement, Mozilla is strangely absent. The risk for Mozilla is that the browser may become just one of many ways to approach the Web.
The Mozilla Platform technologies could have enabled RIA’s nearly a decade ago. Depending on ones definition of an RIA, Mozilla was the first to release one when they rebuilt the original Mozilla Browser using XUL, JavaScript, and other web-related technologies.
According to a blog post from Ms. Baker on the 13th of May, Mozilla will, over the next 18 months, invest in the platform technologies as it pertains to enabling the goals set for Firefox. There will be some added attention given to outside developers working on other XUL-based products. After those 18 months, if Mozilla’s philosophy of the web were to expand beyond just browsing, they could easily bring a more open solution to the world of widget engines and RIA’s. Hopefully that will happen before the end of this 18 month window.
Broad Vision, Broad Action
The browser-centric view of the Web is what has brought about the consideration of modifying Thunderbird’s position with Mozilla. The stated goal for Thunderbird is currently to provide an open alternative for desktop-based e-mail. Mozilla’s vision, though, goes beyond providing alternatives. Firefox has and is changing the landscape of innovative web technology. Broadening the Mozilla activities and projects to encompass more types of information (email, calendaring) makes great sense, but riding it all on the Firefox browser and brand may be unwise. Providing an innovative development platform for working with that information, however, would put Mozilla back out front with Google, Adobe, and Microsoft.
Thunderbird In The Meantime
If browsing related activities are the stated goal of Mozilla for the next 18 months, Thunderbird could still have an important role within the organization. As Ms. Baker pointed out, many users are moving from desktop-based e-mail clients to Web-based or mobile e-mail solutions. While this could be a death knell for Thunderbird as it is today, it could pave the way for a more Firefox-connected approach to mail.
If the Mozilla Platform were the true foundation for Firefox and other products, then Thunderbird could be installed, run, and/or distributed through Firefox as well as on its own. Thunderbird could be distributed as a “webmail” product that utilizes XUL for its interface rather than HTML. In that case it could ship with or without the IMAP/POP functionality, have its settings stored online, and hopefully run as efficiently as it does currently.
With that said, a key feature needed in the Mozilla Platform would be separate environment instances for “application class” extensions. Otherwise, if one Platform-based product crashed, they all would (as multiple browser windows do when one page in one tab causes problems).
Thunderbird could then play many roles: desktop e-mail system, webmail alternative, centralized home for online identities and messaging. It could exist separate from Firefox, as an extension to Firefox, or as part of a larger Mozilla Platform ecosystem.
Choice ‘C’ Please
The “call to action†made several weeks ago pertained only to e-mail. It may seem odd, then, that my conclusion is to ask and hope for greater support of a virtually non-existent product. Whichever of the three options is chosen for Thunderbird, it will have the greatest success if it is placed among a collection of powerful, open, Internet-enabled applications. Firefox in its current role as “universal client†could take on the role of enabling the Platform and the distribution of these applications. Thunderbird could be the first.
With more focus put on enabling developers of all types of Internet-connected applications to create excellent applications, Mozilla could fan a new flame of innovation as it did several years ago with the Mozilla Browser and its Firefox offspring.