Supernova will prove open source project is not dead – just pining for a complete overhaul
The Thunderbird email client – once Mozilla’s most prominent project other than the Firefox browser – is being completely overhauled ahead of a major July release 115, dubbed “Supernova”.
Product design manager Alessandro Castellani last week blogged about plans for the release. He also explained the complex history of the client, which has seen it reach a state he described as akin to “an old, fragile LEGO tower” that looks like it could topple at any moment.
The process that led the app to that state started in 2012 when the Mozilla Foundation stopped focussing on Thunderbird and moved it to a community-driven development model. While plenty of developers volunteered to work on the project, Castellani wrote that “many volunteer contributors with varying tastes … resulted in an inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience.”
Making life harder was the app’s structure – or lack thereof. Castellani described Thunderbird as “literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.”
With developers submitting their own ideas, and no central control, “the lack of constant upstream synchronization with Firefox caused the inability to build and release Thunderbird for months at a time.”
The Mozilla Foundation addressed that, to some extent, by moving Thunderbird into a wholly owned subsidiary called MZLA Technologies Corporation that was permitted to monetize the app.
