Thunderbird — Google question

July 26th, 2007

The first theme in the comments to the Thunderbird and mail post I want to address is the idea that this decision is somehow related to Google, Google products or Google revenue. I want to be as clear as possible about the complete lack of Google involvement.

I have no idea if Google thinks the Thunderbird announcement is a good idea, bad idea, irrelevant or if they even know of it.

To be more specific:

Google and Google products had nothing to do with this decision.
We did not ask Google about Thunderbird product planning, Thunderbird revenue, gmail product planning or gmail revenue.
We did not ask Google’s opinion.
Google’s plans for gmail — whatever they are, and they are unknown to me — are irrelevant to this decision.

Categories: Mozilla | Tags: Google, management, Thunderbird

29 comments for “Thunderbird — Google question”

1
Christian Vitroler said on July 26th, 2007 at 11:23 pm:

You really expect people to believe you? After all those things which happened in the last couple months? Google this, Google that, all over Firefox.

Others have suggest to rename MoCo to Firefox Corporation. I would go a step further. Be honest and rename Firefox to GFE, “Google Front End”
2
Anonymous Coward said on July 26th, 2007 at 11:45 pm:

You’re not answering the actual concern about Google revenue. ie. is Thunderbird being dumped because it doesn’t generate revenue from Google for the MoFo ?
3
Al said on July 27th, 2007 at 12:15 am:

Christian,

Is that really a respectful way to have a conversation with someone? Why bother to comment at all simply to tell someone that they are a liar to their face?
4
jmdesp said on July 27th, 2007 at 12:49 am:

@ano coward : The answer to that will be the point 6 responding to the affirmation that : “Revenue is the determining factor”
5
Michael Smith said on July 27th, 2007 at 2:30 am:

Firefox is the Gmailbrowser.
select, filetate, overtake.
Google needs the Browser and will make it the GBrowser to track users better.
Gaim is Google Talk and FFox is the G-Browser.

that
6
Ashish said on July 27th, 2007 at 3:30 am:

Hmmm,

Agree google has nothing to do with the discussion, but then looking back what scintillated the discussion at first place, it was that thunderbird, over time, has not been the blue eyed boy of mozilla foundation, and which implies that development has suffered.

You do need to improve upon things, and what will you improve against? whitewashed wall?.

There has to be a reason for everything. Bad IE was reason for the fox. If you are developing thunderbird just for sake of “Proving better experience”, then what is that experience against? better needs something to be compared with!

I agree this decision has nothing to do with google strategies, but then you should take into count about all that is happening around as well!
7
Ancestor said on July 27th, 2007 at 3:53 am:

@Christian Vitroler
“After all those things which happened in the last couple months? Google this, Google that, all over Firefox.”

Do you mind to elaborate WHAT exactly has happened in the last couple of months? Let me tell you “happened”: conspiracy theorists, such as yourself, always come up with ideas that Google is pulling the strings. After some time they start to refer to them as facts and use them as a basis for even more speculation, saying that Google is involved “just like previously”.

So please, let’s keep this discussion productive and refrain from baseless statements which as such are impossible to dispute and serve nothing.
8
Mitchell Baker said on July 27th, 2007 at 6:37 am:

Revenue has nothing to do with our thinking about Thunderbird. I put that topic near the end because I thought it would make more sense after describing the other topics. I anticipate some set of people — hopfully small — won’t believe this no matter what I or anyone say, but for others, the assertions revenue is not the issue here will make more sense after the rest of the discussion.
9
Renaud Lepage said on July 27th, 2007 at 7:11 am:

I’d have only one question, Mrs. Baker. Only one, and I’ll expect a true and truthfull answer.

When Google signed on the search engine partnership, did they or did they not specify that the money had to go to Firefox development?

Because if they didn’t, you’d have resources to “clean up” Thunderbird to allow the community to contribute more – I’ve read somewhere that TBird’s code is a pain to work with.
10
Fini Alring said on July 27th, 2007 at 7:33 am:

Trust me, I believe!!

But I still can’t help thinking nothing happened to Thunderbird lately besides ‘built-in’ gmail support.
Being all open app and all, why not at least support a few more webmail services? Make an api and add support for hotmail, yahoomail, gmail and provide and api for other webmail services to integrate with it.

And why is the sunbird project going so extremely slow? This again reminds me of Google Calendar which is a having a blasting success.

So yes I believe, I just don’t know for how long, Mozilla Corp. should definitely be doing a brush-up in the PR/Image dept. Or just sell to Google… ;(
11
Eddy Nigg said on July 27th, 2007 at 7:34 am:

Mitchell perhaps you might want to explain to all this issue better. Because most of us simple don’t seem to get it, including me.

In addition to an answer in my Blog https://blog.startcom.org/?p=28 I would like to add that Thunderbird supplements to Firefox as a color in a picture. If you take away one color (lets say all blue colors and you are left with only red and yellow), your picture doesn’t look complete. I think that adoption of both programs help each other.
12
Saul Tannenbaum said on July 27th, 2007 at 8:25 am:

Mitchell,

Could you comment on what relationship, if any, you see between the Thunderbird future and Chandler?
13
Clint Talbert said on July 27th, 2007 at 10:45 am:

@Renaud Lepage

Before I was a Mozilla employee, I was the Calendar Project QA Coordinator, and I am still one of the core group of Sunbird/Lightning developers. The Sunbird/Lightning Project has only one interaction with Google. One of our developers saw the popularity of the Google Calendar, and decided to create an extension for Sunbird and Lightning so that they can read and write in the proprietary Google Calendar XML protocol. We received precious little help from Google on this project, and have gained nothing in return, save for a few hard-won bug fixes. Honestly, I don’t think Google appreciated this gesture since it breaks down their “walled garden” (you can check in, but never leave…).

The Sunbird/Lightning project progresses so slowly because we have a very tiny team: about 8 developers & QA people working on it *part time*. The Sunbird/Lightning project welcomes any developers/QA folks.

We’ve also had requests and proposals for other types of calendar providers, but frankly those developers have not been as committed, and we’ve seen very little follow-through on these plans.

The one exception to that is the Sun Java Server Calendar. Sun has dedicated two developers and two QA people to make this support possible, and those developers continue to aid us in support of the calendar project as a whole.

So, to sum all this up, the Sunbird project receives no more and no less help and aid from the Mozilla Foundation than any other community project. The Sunbird/Lightning Team continue to work to promote openness and standards based calendaring, and we strive to interoperate with as many systems as we can.

And we’d love to have your help. 🙂

FYI: More recent features that have landed in Thunderbird:
* View Support
* Default views
* Phishing Protection
* Better tagging support
* Improved Filtering
* More pluggable and simplified mime handling support
14
Mitchell Baker said on July 27th, 2007 at 10:53 am:

Saul:

I’m not sure of what relationship might exist between Thunderbird and Chandler. Thunderbird has email and there’s Lightning as a calendar project under development. Chandler has a calendar and task sharing function coming up to a preview release. chandler also has an unusally strong focus on design and use cases behind its development, as well as a web UI and a server.

So there may be some interesting combination there. The technologies are different though which adds complexity.

Eddy: I’m not sure how to be clearer on this particular issue: Google is irrelevant to this. Revenue possibilities in Thunderbird is irrelevant to our thinking. If your question is why we think Thunderbird doesn’t fit within the same operational organization as Firefox, I’ll get more on that posted shortly.

Mitcheklk
15
Jeff Berntsen said on July 27th, 2007 at 10:55 am:

Mitchell,

Okay, let’s say I do believe you with regards to Google’s input into Mozilla Foundation/Corporation’s decision to drop Thunderbird. Based on your other comments, that funding from Mozilla is available for Thunderbird development, I must assume that lack of funds for development and/or marketing is not the problem. That leaves only a couple of other possibilities in my mind as to the reasoning behind the decision.

The first that comes to mind is that this is just an incredibly short-sighted decision based on an assumption that people don’t want or need a dedicated email client. Is that all that’s behind this?

The other is that this is financially related, but not due to lack of funds or influence from Google. The only good possibility that leaves in mind is that someone else other than Google could be leaning on Mozilla to drop Thunderbird. Microsoft perhaps?

Any answer would be greatly appreciated, honest and informative ones doubly so.
16
jigar shah said on July 27th, 2007 at 11:35 am:

Hi mitchell,
Question is not about this new Thunderbird and mail post. Its overall strategy of Mozilla Foundation.
I think there is no need for giving explaination on google relation. If google does not provide enough revenue then it would have been difficult to continue at this pace with FF development. And getting TB a seperate team is also a good idea. But as noted TB development has very slow progress. bugs related to Composer and other component tht are specific to TB are also pending since long time. (I face this since a long time with Composer).
and yes, as Renaud said why include in-built gmail support in TB gamil already provides pop3. Don’t you think community need explaination for this favor to Google ? I love all google products but don’t you think “Open” should me really made open ? Small example could be of Firefox extension for Image upload; for which mozilla took ownership. (Firefox Companion for Kodak EasyShare Gallery). Source code for the same never made available saying “Limitation with Kodak people”. I hope i am not mixing things but overall picture of Mozilla as Open Source Organization seems little dusty..
17
Brendan Eich said on July 27th, 2007 at 11:43 am:

The Mozilla Foundation is a public benefit corporation, obligated to publish detailed forms on our funding. See

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/

and keep watching.

It’s hard to dignify some of the idiotic conspiracy-theory comments here with a reply. Google doesn’t control us, or I would be retired (I could have left Netscape/AOL for Google six years ago; I’m not in this for the money). Businesses don’t “lean on” us in secret to prevent us from taking out, e.g. MS Outlook. Let’s just consider the costs of doing that:

* Interoperating with Exchange (some Linux offerings have worked on this, but it’s non-trivial and pulls toward Enterprise businesses, with high professional services and compatibility overheads).

* Integration of calendaring (something we have in the form of the Lightning addon and the separate Sunbird app) in a first class, competitive way.

* Further Windows integration work.

This all looks a lot different from Firefox, but my main point is: it’s a hell of a lot of work. It is not something to throw money at lightly (and note again that we *are* continuing to fund Thunderbird). Enterprise-oriented Windows email software is not obviously a project that will gain lots of open source community benefits, and that’s another reason not to throw money at it.

I happen to think Exchange is the fat target, and there are some ventures poised to attack it. But not Mozilla, not while we are using the Firefox lever to advance the Web, both via a browser and a platform (three platforms, in order: the Web platform, Firefox add-ons, XUL as platform — the last we want to uplift into the Web standards as much as possible).

Meanwhile, back in the consumer email space, webmail is doing very well, and poised to do even better as browsers evolve and their Ajax and offline capabilities improve. And by the way, gmail is hardly in the lead compared to Hotmail (livemail, or whatever it’s called) and Yahoo! webmail.

To the conspiracy theorists: take off your tin foil hats, put on the thinking cap. Nothing here is mysterious.

To Thunderbird fans: consider that with a separate organization funded to focus on Thunderbird, now is the time to step up and help hack. Thunderbird has never had the hacker community that Firefox has, and throwing money at it won’t build a real community. Put your sweat equity into Thunderbird, don’t just talk.

/be
18
Ben said on July 27th, 2007 at 12:40 pm:

Brendan: It’s worth noting tough that Firefox the app pre 1.0 didn’t have anything like the number of people contributing to it as there are now. There were what maybe 8-10 people contributing to its engineering full time (aggregating partial time). Thunderbird has always had 2 full time engineers. On both sides I am discounting the folk working on Gecko since their work counts towards both apps. The difference is that the availability of revenue has meant the Mozilla Corporation has been able to hire, and hire it has. How many full time engineers contribute to Firefox now?

But yes, hiring people and throwing them at something is not a substitute for a clear, compelling vision.
19
Renaud Lepage said on July 27th, 2007 at 1:12 pm:

I wasn’t criticizing the perceived “bloatware” (that i actually liked). I like the preconfigured gmail access… But I disgress. All in all, I’d rather Thunderbird sticks with the Mozilla foundation, as I perceive Mozilla to be a suite of apps, be it integrated (seamonkey) or separate (Firefox/Camino, Thunderbird/Correo/Penelope, Calendar) apps. No matter what happens, though, I will continue to use the Zilla apps.

And Clint, about inviting me to help: I’d be more than happy to contribute to Thunderbird, be it test or actual code :D. Drop me a mail in my inbox. root — at — cybikbase — dot — com .
20
W^L+ said on July 29th, 2007 at 9:35 am:

I appreciate this, Mitch. I don’t think of conspiracy. I think of user uptake. I think of TB having Mozilla’s organizational imprimatur that makes it possible to slide TB+Lightning into smaller businesses and individual households alongside FF. I think of the time it takes to do this working around the current “you should only have one SMTP account” default mode.

Is there an introductory guide on how to contribute to TB?

By the way, Yahoo’s new mail interface is far too slow for daily use. Everyone I know has switched back to the old one.
21
nanotech said on July 30th, 2007 at 2:36 am:

If the truth is that T_Bird is being Dropped, I am very concerned as that is our client of choice we have been rolling out company wide along with FF and Star 8 (including employee home use). deposing outlook, MSO and IE. With the loss of T_Bird we will be in a quandry as to a client for both Windows and Linux deployments…. even with it’s short list of needed improvements it is still better than Evolution in many, many areas. Google apps is lacking to say the least. Google is the MS of the web… and this just goes to more proof of that
22
Baptiste said on July 30th, 2007 at 10:17 am:

Brendan: no, web mail is not “doing pretty well”. Web mail is reinventing IMAP, poorly. No interoperability between providers, no privacy, no way to do backups. Just Google sinking money at it, and a bunch of idiots thinking it is “cool”. MoCo: remember Microsoft, they used to think the browser was a thing of the past, that “rich applications yada” were the future. You proved them so wrong. Why are you imitating them now about email?
23
nbjayme said on July 30th, 2007 at 11:36 am:

It’s about creating a new breed of email ….

From previous blog…
“We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail.”

🙂

Today’s internet is becoming different from what we know before. Now we have social networking wherein people are hooked and used it as a way of communicating with friends. We also have instant messengers, etc., etc.

With the internet becoming more and more obiquitous people just log in to their webmails and rarely use a client.

This is not to say ThunderBird is no good. It is. But it’s time we face these new challenges and collaborate on making new breed of communication system into a reality.
24
Asa Dotzler said on July 31st, 2007 at 9:49 pm:

Baptiste, you seem to be ignoring the fact that every email provider (like my two ISPs and my employer) offers a webmail client. It’s not just Google and Yahoo and Hotmail. There’s Zimbra, Marek, eMailman, Squirrel, AtMail, and many more webmail servers being used by millions of people. My Cable ISP offers webmail access, my personal web and email host offers webmail access, my employer offers webmail access, etc. etc.

Most of these solutions are implementing IMAP quite well, they’re all doing a fine job with SMTP, there’s plenty of interoperability based on ancient email RFCs, privacy isn’t any more of a concern than it would be with desktop clients and more and more of them are moving towards an offline model that will allow for both archiving and off-line email reading and composing.

I’d say that webmail is doing pretty well.

– A
25
Asa Dotzler said on July 31st, 2007 at 10:28 pm:

Ben, you said: “It’s worth noting tough that Firefox the app pre 1.0 didn’t have anything like the number of people contributing to it as there are now.”

Right, there were about 5 or 6 pretty dedicated volunteers up through 0.6 when MoFo was created and started paying you and one or two others to work on it and by then I’d guess it was up to around 8-10 full time people’s worth of development.

“There were what maybe 8-10 people contributing to its engineering full time (aggregating partial time).”

Agreed.

“The difference is that the availability of revenue has meant the Mozilla Corporation has been able to hire, and hire it has. How many full time engineers contribute to Firefox now?”

I believe that the number is 10.

Seth and I have been doing a lot of really cool community metrics this year and our latest numbers put the total number of code contributors for Firefox+Gecko at about 115 for each of the last two quarters. Mozilla paid about 35 of them. Of that 35, 10 are on Mozilla’s Firefox team.

I don’t have the Firefox/Gecko breakdowns in front of me for contributors not paid by Mozilla but it’s a safe bet that it’s a bit heavy towards Firefox (Gecko being a bit more difficult to work on) — so let’s just say it’s 50 of the 80 people not paid by Mozilla, for the sake of this discussion. Oh, and a cool note, the not paid by Mozilla folks are responsible for about 50% of the code changed over the last two quarters. I think that’s pretty cool.

So, Mozilla has a Firefox team of about 10 people. There’s a community of about 50 people outside of Mozilla’s employ who are contributing about as much code as the Mozilla paid Firefox team is contributing. I don’t have Thunderbird numbers except that I know Mozilla’s paid Thunderbird team is 2 people, or 1/5th of Mozilla’s Firefox team.

I think, though, that a more interesting comparison would be the number of community members contributing extensions or the total number of extensions developed for Firefox and for Thunderbird. There’s where the difference in ecosystems really shows and isn’t tightly coupled to Mozilla’s employment process. You could also look at the number of nightly build downloads. I’m not sure what that number is for Thunderbird lately but it’s up around 15K per day for Firefox. Looking at the Firefox and Thunderbird volunteer affiliate buttons, Thunderbird buttons are viewed about 500K times per week and Firefox buttons are viewed about 25M times per week.

So, yes, Mozilla pays more Firefox developers than Thunderbird developers (5 times as many) but that’s just one measure, and one that I don’t think speaks to the real situation these two projects face. We simply cannot drive change in the world without a large and healthy community. Where we have that, we are effective. Where we don’t have that, we’re not. We don’t have the kind of community around Thunderbird that we do around Firefox. There are probably a lot of reasons, but I think that MoCo’s investment in developers is not key among them.

– A
26
Rakshat said on August 1st, 2007 at 9:22 pm:

@Asa you worote “I think, though, that a more interesting comparison would be the number of community members contributing extensions or the total number of extensions developed for Firefox and for Thunderbird. There’s where the difference in ecosystems really shows and isn’t tightly coupled to Mozilla’s employment process. You could also look at the number of nightly build downloads. I’m not sure what that number is for Thunderbird lately but it’s up around 15K per day for Firefox. Looking at the Firefox and Thunderbird volunteer affiliate buttons, Thunderbird buttons are viewed about 500K times per week and Firefox buttons are viewed about 25M times per week”

and you are right. But an important contributing factor to the above fact is that the community development focus of Mozilla has been around Firefox ever since version 1 (of Firefox) was released on November 9 2004. TB is never going to have the download numbers Firefox but is MoFo willing to give TB a shot by working on a donation supported NYT ad, like you (we) all did for Firefox. What about a project for used generated TV advertisements for TB? How about just putting TB affiliate buttons on the main page of spreadfirefox?

(I know you remember the discussions but looking at the following url will make it clear that there was some interest in having a separate Spread Thunderbird in order to develop a community around it even a long time ago. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/search/node/spreadthunderbird)

I feel talking about the community around TB is very not a very fair assessment. The Firefox community is there because of the efforts of a lot of people (with you being right there at the top of the list). At least some efforts need to be made to develop a community around TB before writing it off.

(I believe that google has nothing to do with this decision and now that the decision has been made my personal preference is for a separate non profit for Thunderbird)
27
Asa Dotzler said on August 1st, 2007 at 11:53 pm:

Rakshat, Mozilla has been focused on community building a lot longer than that. We didn’t just start with Firefox 1.0. One of the core missions of the Mozilla leadership going all the way back to 1998 has been community building. I volunteered specifically to help build non or less technical communities for Mozilla starting in 1998 and moved to doing it full-time in 2000. We have the communities we have today because that’s something we’ve been working on for as long as the project has existed.

You’re mostly talking about the marketing community here, but I actually think that Thunderbird could use more help in documentation and support as well as qa and development. The Tbird audience just isn’t the same as the Firefox audience and I don’t think that marketing with the Firefox techniques would be the right place to put focus for Thunderbird.

Maybe I’m completely wrong, and I’m happy to be proved wrong by some industrious volunteers but I don’t think it’s worth the effort to increase investment in trying to reach Firefox-like users for Thunderbird.

– A
28
Rakshat said on August 2nd, 2007 at 4:59 am:

Asa wrote “Most of these solutions are implementing IMAP quite well, they’re all doing a fine job with SMTP, there’s plenty of interoperability based on ancient email RFCs, privacy isn’t any more of a concern than it would be with desktop clients and more and more of them are moving towards an offline model that will allow for both archiving and off-line email reading and composing”

If there solutions available for easy offline archiving, reading, composition and sorting of webmail without the use of client side applications (TB being one of them)please share information about them with me. Currently I use TB for this purpose mainly (along with managing multiple accounts and profiles on a single computer).
29
Asa Dotzler said on August 4th, 2007 at 1:30 pm:

Rakshat, yes. There are solutions for using webmail offline. There will be more and more as browser support for offline applications grow.

– A