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Thunderbird and Seamonkey to be kicked out of Mozilla AMO?


rach

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Both the Thunderbird email client as well as the SeaMonkey Internet browser have taken a backseat when it comes to development resource distribution over at Mozilla. The products are clearly not as popular as Firefox, and since resources are limited, Firefox is clearly the one product that is getting the most love on Mozilla.

Development resources were moved from Thunderbird last year, which had the result that all releases for the email client afterwards were more or less limited to security and stability fixes.

Seamonkey users on the other hand may have noticed that their product has vanished from Mozilla's product page recently whereas Thunderbird is still listed on the page.

Add-ons on the other hand are still accessible on Mozilla Add-ons, so that Thunderbird and Seamonkey users can download and install extensions from the official website for their product.

If you are following the development over at Mozilla you may know that the organization plans to merge AMO, that is Mozilla Add-ons, with the Firefox Marketplace.

mozilla-products.jpg

A very likely consequence of this is that Thunderbird and Seamonkey won't be supported anymore on Mozilla Add-ons. A recent conversation between Philip Chee and Mike Conley, Seamonkey and Thunderbird leads, indicates this in clear terms:

(Philip Chee) Well the reason I ask is that once amo gets merged into marketplace, TB and SM extensions are going to get the boot

This stance is confirmed in a conversation between Philip Chee and Jorge Villalobos, Mozilla Add-ons Developer Relations Lead.

(Jorge Villalobos) It's likely that when marketplace and AMO and consolidated (whenever that is), applications that aren't Firefox will be dropped entirely.

What we know
We know that Mozilla will merge AMO and the Firefox Marketplace in the future. There is no data for that yet, and it may very well be in 2015 the earliest.

A very likely consequence of the new AMO is that Mozilla products that are not Firefox related won't be supported by it.

This means that both Thunderbird and Seamonkey will have to find alternatives that they can use to provide users with extensions for the products.

:view: View: Original Article

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That sucks. I was wondering why Thunderbird was getting updated less and less. Most people these days get their email web based (if they even use email).

We've come a long way haven't we? - Not!

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That'd be hard. I really like Thunderbird a lot more than any Mail Client I've tried on any OS. Though I'm not a user of SeaMonkey, it would suck if they drop add-on support for it.

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Very sad news.

I´m a huge fan of TB. I´ve been using it since it´s first release, back in 2004. It´s really hard to see such a great product discontinued.

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Thunderbird I only run for nostagia now.

All my yahoo accounts I read via mailwasher pro or live mail.

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Guys its not Thunderbird that will get discontinued, but just its addons.

By reading some Mozilla's statements, Thunderbird will, most likely, go next.

At least, it seems like it. I hope not.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/so-thats-it-for-thunderbird/

http://dottech.org/73932/bye-bye-thunderbird/

Edited by Guinness
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Mozilla has stopped working on Thunderbird long time ago. They had also planned to make it managed by community, like SeaMonkey, however, not sure what happened then.

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Mozilla has stopped working on Thunderbird long time ago. They had also planned to make it managed by community, like SeaMonkey, however, not sure what happened then.

What are you talking about?

Thunderbird v24.0 was released on 18th September 2013

Edited by LeeSmithG
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Mozilla has stopped working on Thunderbird long time ago. They had also planned to make it managed by community, like SeaMonkey, however, not sure what happened then.

What are you talking about?

Thunderbird v24.0 was released on 18th September 2013

Sorry my mistake. Mozilla hasn't exactly stopped working on Thunderbird, however, they won't be doing any changes to it anymore.

On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new development model is based on Mozilla offering only "Extended Support Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing community to take over the development of new features.

Source

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Yes, that's what I understood from the rather old news (2012) I've read here and there.

Thunderbird will be, sooner or later, relegated to ESR. Unfortunately.

Edited by Guinness
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I don't see whats the problem of Mozilla not adding new features to Thunderbird? Its much more complete compared to other Mail clients.

Thing that shouldn't be dropped are security vulnerabilities fixes.

Also Thunderbird updated to 24.1 so uhm. :showoff:

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