Posted by bentobean 2 days ago
Mozilla has lost all trust from me, the recent privacy policy fiasco was the straw that broke the camel's back.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/
Guilty by association.
This has been repeated so many times that people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually make arguments to support it. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature that could have returned all the Firefox's market share that they were unable to make on account of spending on the VPN or acquiring Pocket or starting the VC fund or whatever. I don't know where this idea came from, but it seems to have been a mass collective hallucination.
I have problems with dabbling in ad tech. I have problems with strategic vision. But I have more problems with people being confidently wrong in the backwaters of internet comment sections not even pretending to attach these claims to any factual basis whatsoever. I mean if you really want to go look at a recent 990 form from Mozilla, look at the amount spent on browser development, make your best guess as to what it costs to administer the VPN, then make the case that the money used on it represents money that could have been invested in the browser development, but wasn't, make the case for the missing feature that would have otherwise been there, and then make the case that that would have boosted Mozilla's market share back to 33%. Those are all the missing steps of actual logic and reasoning and causation that would be necessary to substantiate this argument. But bafflingly, everyone just repeats this while skipping all the steps.
Firefox was never going to be fully ported to Rust, at least not in any short timespan.
The amount of lies that get spread about the Mozilla Corporation and Firefox is insane. The fact that we continue to see it here in a thread about Thunderbird and MZLA Technologies is even crazier.
Rust's successes in a variety of codebases and in a variety of organizations does far more for maturing and proving Rust's value proposition than a single codebase would be.
I totally understand why and it's fair, but if you want to take on gmail, you just lost. Google is dominant because most of its services are free.
That "Usrs" is not my typo. And what strange choices for domain names.
Anyway I hope they launch a custom domain supporting paid email service (and not go skimpy on details and features like, e.g., Apple's iCloud).
Trust once lost is not easily regained.
Fix your trust issue.
The decision to reduce focus on Thunderbird was remarkably mistimed with the email client market just shooting through the roof with a bunch of orivate players being acquired for tens and hundreds of millions right after.