The
Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for The
Thunderbird Project, but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation
infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project.Phillip Kewisch, 5/9/17
Source: Mozilla Blog
After Thunderbird was led down by Mozilla it started to fall back a lot in development. While Mozilla changed the Firefox completely, making it faster and more modern, Thunderbird still takes ages to open and is sluggish to use. An example for this is the implementation of a core browser for things like login to Google and the "Add-Ons" website, which is so terribly basic, missing things like a history to go back. that it is a pain to use. The ugly and outdated design of it doesn't give any sense of security to the user whatsoever. Other problems are the implementations of chats, contacts, a calendar and a task scheduler since all these things do not sync (correctly) with the ones from your email adresses. This really can become a hassle because you would need to enter all of the data twice. In comparison to the built-in email client in Windows 10 it is far better integrated syncing the data even though being very minimalistic. Really confusing are also the two different menus, the menu bar and the menu button, which contain different settings. Another missed opportunity is the implementation of cloudsharing, which exists, but relies on the completely outdated Add-Ons through which the user should install other services. Since this is not possible (anymore) it is completely useless.
What will emails in general be in the future?
The email we know exists for a pretty long time (at least for the Internet) and is by itself somewhat outdated. Today the transfer of files is often done through clouds, except for documents which need to be sent to several persons, while the display of the content, which is done in html, could be improved as well. If the email completely changes in the future, which could happen, Thunderbird might have a chance of competing with other products and software again. But if the current trend continues, inboxes will be mainly on the browser, which is probably the reason why Mozilla ditched Thunderbird.
Will Thunderbird be gone in the future?
There is a pretty good chance Thunderbird will disappear if our digital communication continues to move to browsers. Features of Thunderbird like the tabs are all present in browsers and it would be redundant to develop two different Internet clients, one for communication and one for browsing, when you could just develop one universal browser (I am not talking about SeaMonkey). Thunderbird is, even though its appearance is being reworked (in Beta), probably only developed until the email dies (as some kind of legacy) and a new and more modern way of (professional) communication is created.
Even though I named several arguments against Thunderbird being gone in the future I never can and am 100% correct. Therefore share your opinion and ideas in the comments to discuss about Thunderbird's future.
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