I’ve been a user of Mozilla products since the name change from Phoenix to Firebird, and been through, thick and thin, the struggles the team faced then. And overcame those, we did.

Firefox was a completely volunteer effort for the first year of its life (major contributions from blake, dave, joe, jan, pch, me, bryner, and kerz, none of them paid to work on Firefox.) We had a thriving community of unpaid developers, testers, advocates and evangelists, a clear product roadmap through the first six milestones, a plan for building momentum and a significant user base migrating from IE — all of this before the Mozilla Foundation even existed (and long before the formation of the Corporation).

So yes, Firefox didn’t just happen overnight. It was a small community project that was able to build amazing momentum among a growing group of dedicated volunteers and users. We had a product roadmap and a large community of supporters turning that document into reality.

And eventually it saw increased interest from the Mozilla Foundation and much later the Mozilla Corporation.

So, I guess you’re sort of correct.

- A

Thunderbird is actually very succesfull. I could not find any numbers on market shares, but I found an article (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/27909) that says that Thunderbird reached 50 million downloads this july. This happened just two years after Firefox reached that same number(when it had half the current market share). That’s a lot of users. Thunderbird is now at the position where Firefox was two years ago.

What about the credibility of the Mozilla brand. Most users dont know about open source or the Mozilla Organisation. They just use these products from something called Mozilla. The last couple of years Thunderbird has been prominently promoted on the Mozilla web site front page. It does NOT really show responsibility to your users, when Mozilla would suddenly stop supporting it. Or worse, discontinue it, which is what I think Option 1 amounts to(becauses Thunderbird looses the Mozilla brand).

It would more sense to me when this change had come a couple of years ago when Mozilla had much less resources. But now when there is a lot more income, this change comes as a really big surprise. In fact I expected that Mozilla would look to broaden it’s application range instead of narrow it, given it’s goal of keeping the *internet* open and accessible.

these companies possibly control many of the things around us, so imagine how grateful they would be for an excellent email client. but they would not be vocal; they would not go around promoting it; nor will they talk and rave about it on the web. The effects are just “hidden”. I feel that these effects may even be bigger or more significant than the highly visible Firefox ripples that we constantly see.

Firefox didn’t just happen overnight. With no effort and no roadmap, no increase in interest from the part of the corporation itself, no group of dedicated volunteers, do you really think that Firefox would have gotten to where it would be today?

Effort, and as what Majken and Jason have mentioned above me, the community and the belief that it can happen, is what definitely counts. It takes time.

Please do reflect (among yourself(yourselves)) on the many hundreds of comments that have been posted on this blog, as well as the many others in the community that have voiced their opinions.

I could say the exact same thing as everyone else commenting here, because they are all right. The reason it is not where it needs to be is on you, not the program. You are the leader and good leadership starts at the top. I am not saying you are not a good leader, but this is your time to really put on the shine and listen to those that put you where you are today. Without the support of those like you see here, you would not have Firefox being at the level it is. Trust us when we ask you to do something, because when you do, you find that we will go to the ends of the Earth to use it, promote it, develop solutions around it, and make it a name to be reckoned with. Every time you see that newspaper ad, remember that there is no reason why you cannot do that again, and again.

Give it some belief, some time, some focus and some energy and watch the magic happen.

-jason

I always thought that this was the point of the Mozilla foundation, but maybe this is what always sticks out to me when I meet people who have been involved since Netscape vs. those who have had the privilege of helping Firefox while it was on its way. Wanting to make a difference vs wanting to change the world.

Your reasoning seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. How can Thunderbird reach world changing success if there isn’t a group of people behind it that care about making a difference because a difference can be made? But you’re saying that people won’t care and give it that attention cuz they can ride Firefox’ coat tails instead of putting in the work, and since people want to work on Firefox, that’s what’s getting resources.

I know this is supposed to be explaining why Thunderbird can’t exist in the same Corp as Firefox, but you give such passionate reasons why it just wouldn’t get attention. I don’t see how you can credibly turn around and say “oh no, the *foundation* doesn’t feel that way, a subsidiary for Thunderbird would be a *completely* different story.”

FWIW I always understood it that work on open source, and such new products (relatively) as these two are just very resource intensive. As Firefox grows, it needs more resources, and it’s difficult to keep up with the resources Firefox needs as it is. People who are hired for marketing or build for example do not have time to work on both products effectively. TB needs to have its own structure rather than sharing resources so that those resources don’t get overloaded. This could in theory be done as a division within the Mozilla Corp. I never thought it was because people just don’t *want* to work on Thunderbird.

Die Pläne den EMail-Clienten Thunderbird aus der Mozilla Foundation auszugliedern haben für viel Gesprächsstoff gesorgt. Infolgedessen kamen sogar Gerüchte auf, Mozilla würde den Thunderbird sterben lassen. Dem widersprachen nun Mitchell Baker und As

Webmail and “social networking” is not an option for company email. It’s an additional feature, but a strong email client is an absolute must, and trusting sensitive corporate data to huge megacorporations — however noble their motives may be — is not an option. For one thing, we absolutely must be in control of our filtering and able to do fine-grained logging, as well as reliably storing potentially tens of gigabytes of data per user. Thus, the need for our own mail server, IMAP being the logical choice, and a good IMAP client on top of that server. Now the funny part: Thunderbird is already one of the best IMAP clients there are, and it also has a very user-acceptable interface. There really is no serious Windows alternative (I’ve tried them all).

Webmail is only an option for the hip 20-30-something who doesn’t store lots of data, don’t need trackability, and trust Google with their online life.

The open internet absolutely needs a high quality “corporate alternative” mail client on the desktop, or Exchange/Outlook will take over that whole market, and we all know that MS /will/ then enforce their own formats on us. They are already making it purposefully hard to use IMAP with their products. This will affect the whole net.

In fact, Thunderbird has the potential to unify several open protocols (IMAP, Web/CalDav, LDAP) and build the front end of a solid OSS corporate messaging solution. That may not be “Firefox on every consumer desktop”, but there sure are lesser goals worth pursuing, too.