Hey Daniel, Lots of questions; let me try. Keep in mind that there are plenty of points of views at Mozilla. These are my opinions which are influenced by the gecko developers I work with and the Firefox teams that I support. Some of this will feel like tit for tat, my intent is only to address each of your questions.
> a. all the underlying technologies of Thunderbird's world (XPCOM, XUL, > XBL, XUL-based add-ons) are on the verge of being deprecated. Is the > announced move a way to decouple faster, as it seems reading your > bullet point 8? What other areas of Gecko will be "cleaned up" if > that decoupling happens? This question is an absolutely major one > because it will deeply impact the rendering engine's choice. > It's unclear at this point what would be deprecated or what time frame we're talking about. The bigger picture is that I want the web to win. I want it to be more-awesome than Android, iOS, Win32, and xul-gecko. I want people to be able to build products like Thunderbird and BlueGriffon directly on the web. This is where we're heading. > b. Thunderbird will still need to embed a browser, even if it does not > use any more XUL or XPCOM in the future. Embeddability of Gecko has > always been a poor parent of the project. Very familiar with that problem... Fifteen years ago I was embedding Gecko into the AOL/Gateway Crusoe! > Will it change or should > Thunderbird look for rendering engine alternatives? > This is something the TB team should figure out -- I am in no position to talk for them. > > c. if a is true, then a very long list of third-party apps, like my own > (BlueGriffon line) or Seamonkey, will be very deeply impacted. What > about them/us? > This is speculation. Maybe someone would carry a branch with XUL support. Or maybe someone would build a transcompiler. Or maybe the authors of these programs would rewrite to the web. Keep in mind, there is no plan to remove XUL or stop supporting XUL. Firefox depends on XUL and it's unlikely that will change anytime soon. > > d. do you have any ETA or deadline? I suspect that a rewriting of TB > w/o Mozilla technologies is a >=2 years effort for a team of 2 to 3. > This is a conversation that the Thunderbird owners will have to have. I do think that it is way premature to even think about removing XUL from Gecko. One more thing: We plan on supporting Thunderbird at Mozilla until there is a proper transition. Thunderbird users will continue to get releases and security fixes. Thanks for the questions! Doug _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
