There has been a lot of chatter and debate in the Mozilla development community of late over a recent decision by Mozilla’s powers-that-be that will see the development of Mozilla Thunderbird, the e-mail companion software to the (far) more popular Firefox somehow spun off into its own entity. There’s been a lot of spirited debate about this decision and a lot of people are questioning the decision. However, there is a crucial element that I think hasn’t really been explored properly, one that really puts this decision into true perspective.
Let me explain by first saying this: I am pretty old school when it comes to approaching email. I keep my primary personal email account in Outlook 2003. I actually do use Thunderbird for several of my other accounts (primarily my dimensionsix accounts), and I do find it a perfectly capable email client. The key thing here is that I’m still living in fat client land. I’m definitely a part of a shrinking majority. With the emergence of web-based email services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and GMail, more and more users have switched to using one of these services for their email needs. What we are experiencing in growing numbers is what I would say is little less than a (slowly evolving) paradigm shift in email from fat-client model to a web-client one. Within this paradigm shift lies a key concept: the user platform for email functionality has changed as well.
Think about it this way. I remember the original Hotmail in 1995, before Microsoft acquired it (by the way, interesting aside: do you know why they called it Hotmail? Maybe because buried in that name are the letters H-T-M-L? Nifty, huh?). It was cool to be able to send and receive email through the web, but the functionality was limited, and fat-clients like Netscape or Eudora made the most sense to use. They had the newest features and the up-and-coming innovations in email usage.
Let’s fast forward 12 years now. We’re currently in the midst of this whole Web 2.0 cycle of innovation. Technologies such as AJAX and JSON have enabled web developers to start to do really cool stuff with their website applications. Email has naturally evolved to follow this pattern. Google was the first and most prevalent with GMail, but Yahoo and Microsoft have followed suit. The fact of the matter is that the big three have been able to bring their web email experiences on par with the functionality that most desktop clients provide (e.g., both the new Hotmail and Yahoo’s mail beta allow you to drag and drop messages to folders you have in your email, like you can with a fat-client). In fact, some features, like GMail’s tagging tools, somewhat exceed what a fat-client offers. And, this isn’t limited to just consumer-level email. With each succeeding version of Exchange Server, Microsoft continues to improve it’s excellent Exchange Web Access feature, which allows you to get your corporate email via the web. Now instead of companies putting their effort into developing out fat-client email programs, they’re leveraging all these web technologies to make fat clients unnecessary.
Once you look at it in this way, Mozilla’s decision to push off Thunderbird and focus solely on Firefox makes a lot of sense. We’re finally starting to see some of those lofty promises from 1998 about how the web will be the platform and all of that, at least in this one limited way. The driver for all of this has been developers like the folk behind Firefox (and yes, even Microsoft, for without them and their wonderful XMLHttpRequest object, this would be a moot discussion) who have taken these new ideas and turned the web browser into something far greater than just a means of viewing textual data. It’s something to think about before you complain too much.
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