Hate to be a stick in the mud, but I worry about a loss of focus when Thunderbird is one of the few in a dying category on the desktop, which is much less true on mobile.
I currently use Thunderbird on desktop, but use a combination of Gmail and Outlook on Android. If Thunderbird picks up K-9 mail and turns it into a first-class mobile client, I'll probably use Thunderbird instead of the Outlook app. People like consistency.
Every few months Mozilla tries to overhaul it's UI and succeeds only to try again later. What are they trying to do? What's the real reason behind their slow descent into irrelevance?
Last time I tried Firefox on Android, it was a mess. Crashing every few minutes, unpredictable. I hear its a lot better now which is great! But why did they ditch the old one?
[0] https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+101,chrome+102&compareC...
edit: added link to caniuse.com
There was a time when Chrome was faster by an ample margin, but it's no longer enough to be an important distinction. Between the privacy respecting features, and plugin support on mobile - Firefox is the best choice.
If anything, it shows the damage of a browser-tech monopoly which Edge and Brave aren't helping with.
This is bad for Firefox because developers will eventually (and some still do) will simply stop supporting Firefox due it being so slow to catch up. Chrome already has such a huge market that a lot of web devs already don't care (e.g. Microsoft Teams).
What does this signify? It's the death of Firefox unless Firefox pulls a miracle here. Chrome is leading, all the devs are following, and they leading by leaps and bounds. Firefox is forced to catch up which causes frustration among users.
How long before Firefox gets tired of playing catch up and simply becomes irrelevant?
I am not happy about this. This is clearly bad but inevitable. The only other real competitor is WebKit which is restricted to Apple only. A huge market still. But Google's monopoly over the browsing market will only cause harm in the long run. Even though it will make devs jobs a lot easier.
Coincidentally, Brave believes they are privacy-invasive and don't support those features either (last paragraph in the article)[0].
Firefox, as with all other browsers aside from Safari, will remain with less than 5% market share for the foreseeable future. But I'd much rather continue supporting different browser engines than use a skinned Chromium to uphold the status quo.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/google-plan-for-chrome-c...
Mozilla, Apple, and Brave all disagree (as do I).
The overarching theme of your writing on this topic is that Chrome can just spit out Web 'features' at random and unless Firefox implements all of them immediately it is dying. I hope you can try to understand that not only is this not an accurate assessment, but maybe also that Firefox has value beyond being a copy of Chrome.
Mozilla needs to step up and find ways to expose such APIs though, because they are useful. Just saying "no" without proposing a solution is a sure way to lose. There's a bit of hope recently with the implementation of WebMIDI in Gecko.
It's telling that the only browser vendor that feels this way has the logo of one of the two most privacy invading companies in existence.
There's also Kiwi. It runs pretty much any extension available for Desktop Chromium.
But 20 > 0, all the same.
So why would anybody bother writing an extension for Firefox mobile?
The category of FOSS email apps may not be dying, but it is small, and never far away from death. Having a large, established project with decent resources backing K-9 is definitely a good thing for the health of the category IMO. Personally I use FairEmail and hope that it will continue to thrive as well.
I reluctantly agree. I think that the continuing relevance of email is largely a consequence of open standards and interoperability - things that Google et al are getting less and less keen on. As well as Thunderbird allowing me to have a copy of my emails on my desktop/laptop, rather than in someone's cloud, I think its good to have an open-standard success story to point to.
But in reality I use the Fastmail web client on desktop and Fastmail's app on my Android devices. Despite using Thunderbird for over a decade, nowadays I really only use it to sync a local email archive. I wish it were otherwise.