Much of Mozilla’s leadership — including that of the Thunderbird team — has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts.

Pity they haven't come to the same conclusion about Firefox, rather than the continued focus on new doodads, more functionality, and endless updates.

Hi there.

I stopped using Firefox when IE8 came out -- Suffered the same fate as lots of other products -- "Too much Feature-itus". Same with Nero (although Nero has finally gone back to its roots and released a "Nero-Lite" -- probably too late as who uses physical CD's and DVD's any more --certainly a diminishing number of people and now Windows 8 (and even Windows 2012 Server) can mount native iso files from the OS the number will diminish even more quickly.

For email clients on windows Outlook really is the only sensible choice -- office 2007 can still be found very cheaply --outlook hasn't changed much over the years and is still fit for purpose --especially as more people use smart phones and tablets for email rather than computers too. Kingsoft office (Free phone app) works fine too.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice_eng&hl=en

For Non windows systems there's plenty of decent browsers, office suites and email apps around -- Firefox has IMO definitely passed it's sell by date (as has Thunderbird or "Blunderbird" as it seems to have morphed into).

Cheers
jimbo

smarteyeball said:

It's a shame for Thunderbird users. There's going to be some unhappy campers.

I stopped using it myself a while back, but it was still a good app.

ignatzatsonic said:

Pity they haven't come to the same conclusion about Firefox, rather than the continued focus on new doodads, more functionality, and endless updates.

True. FF used to be the only browser worth using for me at one point. Almost close to being a fanboi - but these days - meh.

Firefox ended up getting slower and slower due to everything that was being added. I used it for quite a while and it just kept freezing on me. I didn't really like the Chrome layout, but I ended up changing and getting used to it. It's so much faster and smoother how Firefox USED to be until they threw everything on it.

Let's not forget to mention the things that Firefox removed for the sake of removing: The status bar, the properties window, and a clean address bar dropdown, among other nonsensical modifications.

As for Thunderbird, I'm happy as long as they continue to maintain it with occasional security/stability/compatibility updates. I use TB for keeping track of my email and I never did update it all that much anyway; I'd try other email clients but nothing out there is lightweight or simple like Outlook Express was.