I am sure that the current trend of changes to #Firefox and the resulting rewrite of #Thunderbird will necessarily affect #SeaMonkey. Essentially, I think SM lacks independent development resources, so if the divergence is quick enough or large enough, SM will have to write a separate mail component or give up.
This reminds me of a Matrix client I was using. The developers of what was then called Riot changed frameworks or something and the downstream client I used ended development.
A lot of us are concerned about #Firefox, about #Thunderbird, and about #Mozilla itself. The trouble is, most of the seeds of Moz's current affliction were planted early on, when the #Google search deal was first signed.
They received an unimaginable amount of money, and being good people, they decided to pour it into becoming the Web's advocate and (later on) the Web's privacy advocate.
They built a large organization, with some very high salaries at the top, based on the revenue they received from a single customer. And then that customer launched its own browser, #Chrome, in part because Firefox was going slower than Google desired because so many resources were going into other projects and because Google's plans were not always aligned with what Mozilla believed was best for the Web.
It was always an unsustainable situation, and when things changed due to cooperation being replaced with coopetition, they started a panicked grasping for other revenue sources.
Now, they've cut actual developers, which makes it even more difficult to keep up with Chrome / #Chromium (and the many browsers derived from it). And because they need to find other revenue sources, they keep looking for ad deals ... which runs crosswise with its core users, who want to block ads.
So, yeah, I don't see a way out that leaves them as anything other than a niche product produced by a small team of mostly volunteers.
I do think _personalization_ as a differentiator is going to flop, if they're thinking about color schemes and superhero logos. A big chunk of what people did with XUL (the former technology, and what made it so customizable) was produce ad blockers, script blockers, embedded-media blockers, pop-up blockers, cookie and tracking blockers, proxy tools, and web development tools (webdev toolbars, xml toolbars, json tools, css and xsl tools, sqlite tools). I just don't think that the ability to make your browser look like the Spiderman t-shirt you bought last week is going to win over a lot of people who are using Chrome/Chomium/Edge/Opera/Vivaldi/Brave/Iron.
Now, maybe if they make it the most secure and private browser right out of the box, with ad blocking, script blocking, and so on, plus make it faster than the Chromium family while consuming less RAM and crashing less often, then adding the ability to dress the browser up as Dora the Explorer will total enough advantages to make a difference.
Aha. #Claws-mail isn't saving the filters at all. I could install #Sylpheed and see whether it has working filters, but I'm already pretty sure #Thunderbird will do what I want.
I don’t know if it is CM or the mail host that caught the Black Friday junk mail and sent it to the spambox. If it is CM, that’s the only filter that seems to work.
As for side projects, in their new, limited-resource world, every new project takes resources away from #Firefox, #Thunderbird, and #Rust. Sometimes that's worth the cost, sometimes it isn't, but take a look at how many projects they've abandoned (such as their mobile OS).
Starts with a comparison of #Firefox market share and the pay of #Mozilla's top executive
I did not search for it, but around the time they laid off 1/4 of their workforce, I thought I saw something about some pay reductions for their top management.
My personal assessment is this: as the browser started picking up share, they also picked up a patron (Google) that seemed to provide unlimited funding. It was during this period that all the "privacy NGO" ideas started, because they had more than enough money for their main projects and decided they'd spend the rest "doing good".
I can't fault them for that. But I do think that Mozilla's current state is pretty closely related to having "grown up" with unlimited money to spend on tangentially related projects.
At some point, Google decided that their interests were better served with an owned-and-controlled browser, and the rest is history.
There's always the hope that Mozilla will open up more Firefox and #Thunderbird development to non-paid programmers and start asking its users to optionally contribute financially. This could help, but there still needs to be a soul-searching that asks whether they are a group that develops a browser and a mail client or some sort of generic web and privacy advocacy group that just happens to develop those applications.
Those are two different roads, and with a much more constrained income stream, they can't be both at once any more.
@michel_slm > messaging is less structured [in Matrix] than email
In the current clients (#Riot etc), but AFAIK there's nothing stopping the development of new Matrix clients with a more email-like UX. In theory, an offline mail client like #Thunderbird could be forked and ported from email/ #UseNet/ #RSS protocols to Matrix, with the normal mail UI used for 1=1 mails, and the newsreader UI used for group mails.
@geniusmusing@nu.federati.net I guess one more possible funding source is creating customized mail clients atop the FOSS version of #Thunderbird, but after the way they failed with #Eudora, I doubt anyone would trust #Mozilla to invest the resources to make such a thing viable.
Just not aggressive enough. I want as close to zero spam to get through as possible, even at the expense of blocking some legitimate messages. Everyone already knows that messages sometimes get filtered.
@bob @maiyannah #Mozilla had a rudimentary chat client (I think it did #IRC and #XMPP) embedded in #Thunderbird, but it was garbage, so no one used it.
@bob @maiyannah #Mozilla had a rudimentary chat client (I think it did #IRC and #XMPP) embedded in #Thunderbird, but it was garbage, so no one used it.
This bit I like very much: "The primary reason we’ve been able to do this is an increase in donors to the project. We hope that anyone reading this will consider giving to Thunderbird as well. Donations from individual contributors are our primary source of funding, and we greatly appreciate all our supporters who made this year so successful!"