#Mozilla thunderbird forums software#

The community grew, and the project became a solid example of real software democracy! Many features and customization options were introduced because a lot of community members started sharing and proposing their ideas to improve Thunderbird.

#Mozilla thunderbird forums code#

The blessing: it sparked a fire of support and contributions inside the community, allowing passionate contributors to submit code and improve Thunderbird in areas they cared about. This decision was both a blessing and curse. This meant that community members and external contributors would be in charge of developing and supporting Thunderbird. On July 6, 2012, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would no longer be focused on innovations for Thunderbird, and that the future Thunderbird development would transition to a community-driven model. Throughout the years, Mozilla’s focus shifted a lot, investing less and less resources into the development of Thunderbird.

That cost - and what I’ll talk about next - is why Thunderbird has accumulated an enormous amount of “technical debt” to pay off. Keeping up with the upstream changes is not a simple task, and on some occasions it takes up most of our days. So, you can imagine how many times per week things suddenly break in Thunderbird because a C++ interface was renamed, or an API was deprecated, or a building library was upgraded. Firefox has hundreds of developers constantly changing and improving things on a daily basis. Keep in mind that Thunderbird is currently being actively developed by a bit more than a dozen core developers. Unfortunately, this approach comes with a hefty cost. Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point. Obviously there’s more complexity to it, including a lot of C++, JS, CSS, and XHTML to ensure everything works properly. In doing so, Thunderbird can tag along Firefox for their release cycle, inherit security patches, benefit from extensions support, and much more. Things like cross-platform support, the Gecko web renderer, the Spidermonkey JavaScript compiler, and so on. We love using Firefox as our base architecture, because it leverages all the very good stuff within. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface. Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. Why? Because the original pieces don’t fit anymore. Then, once you reach that center piece, you replace it, and then add back the pieces you removed with slightly different pieces. This means you have to slowly remove the blocks above it to keep the tower from collapsing. If you replace just that piece, the whole tower will crumble. But years later, you realize the crucial center piece serving as the foundation is using the wrong shape. Making major changes - as we’re doing with Supernova - requires very careful consideration.Īs you’re reading this, it might help to imagine Thunderbird as an enormous Lego tower you’ve built. Thunderbird is a monolithic application that has been developed by thousands of people over the course of two decades. What’s all this stuff about “technical debt?” Why does it need to be rebuilt? Let’s talk about how we got here, and shed some light on the the complicated history of Thunderbird’s development. Thunderbird: An Old, Fragile LEGO Tower Photo by Mourizal Zativa on Unsplash

Inside those objectives there are hundreds of very large steps that need to happen, and achieving everything will require a lot of time and resources. Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface.Make the code base leaner and more reliable, rewrite ancient code, remove technical debt.Throughout the next 3 years, the Thunderbird project is aiming at these primary objectives:

Simply “adding stuff on top” of a crumbling architecture is not sustainable, and we can’t keep ignoring it. This is not an easy task, but it’s necessary to guarantee the sustainability of the project for the next 20 years. Thunderbird is undergoing a massive rework from the ground up to get rid of the technical and interface debt accumulated over the past 10 years. It’s a modernized overhaul of the software, both visually and technically. With this year’s release of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova,” we’re doing much more than just another yearly release. 3 Objectives For The Next 3 Yearsīefore we really dig in, let’s start with the future. Watch our companion video, hosted by Alex, which goes into even more detail.