Development on Thunderbird stopped.

[Sonny Golovine]

I don't think Mozilla is going to discontinue support for Thunderbird, 
its just going to slow it down a bit. When you think about changes in 
terms of the web, the web is constantly evolving, new technologies, new 
languages and more things that require support browser side. This means 
that web browsers constantly need updating to support the latest in web 
technologies.

However when you look at the landscape of email, there isn't much change 
going on in the technology. Some of the core technology such as IMAP, 
POP and SMTP hasn't really changed all that much. I remember setting up 
my AOL email address in Outlook back in 2005 or so. The process hasn't 
really changed all that much and neither has the technology.

With that said its a waste of resources to constantly give Thunderbird 
new features every six weeks. Thunderbird for now works and doesn't 
really need any new features. Any new features will most surely come in 
the form of Add-Ons. What Thunderbird needs now is stability rather than 
features.

I currently run TB 10.0.2ESR and don't have any plans of upgrading any 
further. Why? Thunderbird right now for me just works. It checks my 
emails and all the addons work with no bugs. With that said I don't ever 
see a need to upgrade. Upgrading will just give me more features that I 
don't need and possibly break things I rely on.

Thunderbird will most likely not cease development but rather just slow 
down the pace.




On 7/6/12 10:12 PM, Jim Byrnes wrote:
> Just noticed this link on another list but haven't seen any mention of 
> it here yet.
>
> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/so-thats-it-for-thunderbird/
>
> Looks like desktop email programs are fading in favor of webmail 
> solutions. Hopefully gmail will not be the new Ubuntu default.
>
> Regards, Jim
>
>