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Firefox Mozilla Software Businesses IT

Mozilla May Separate Itself From Thunderbird Email Client (techcrunch.com) 418

An anonymous reader writes: A company-wide memo distributed throughout the Mozilla Foundation by chairperson Mitchell Baker argues that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird email client in order to focus on Firefox. She said, "Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies. At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird." Both projects are wasting time helping each other, and those demands are only going to get worse. She says many within Mozilla want to see it support community-managed projects without doing the bulk of the work on it, and perhaps Thunderbird could be one of those projects. Baker stresses that no decisions have been made yet — they're starting the conversation early to keep the community involved in what happens to Thunderbird.
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Mozilla May Separate Itself From Thunderbird Email Client

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  • Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aicrules ( 819392 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:30PM (#51035027)
    It could still live on as an optional add-on, but focusing on making a really good browser is a great idea.
    • Re:Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:37PM (#51035077) Homepage

      Yeah, no kidding ... I'm pretty sure I've not used Mozilla as a mail client in at least a decade, maybe even longer.

      I want a fast, lean, standards compliant browser, which respects my privacy, and isn't trying to do 50 other things.

      Why is that so hard, and why does everyone think Mozilla needs to be a catchall for everything you could possibly do on the internet?

      • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:49PM (#51035141)

        Why should Mozilla keep an Open Source email client alive?

        After all, everyone loves Outlook and Windows Mail and Apple Mail, and those corporations know what's best for us.

        • Outlook is used by big organizations that don't seem to know any better, there is little to no chance of them moving to Mozilla.

          However most others will use web based tools such as GMAIL just because they are just as handy as any application. With the fact that it won't fill you hard disk up.

          • by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:46PM (#51035639)

            You missed the <sarcasm> tag. Perfectly natural - Slashdot's html editing accidentally suppressed it.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Outlook is used by big organizations that don't seem to know any better, there is little to no chance of them moving to Mozilla.

            However most others will use web based tools such as GMAIL just because they are just as handy as any application. With the fact that it won't fill you hard disk up.

            Yeah, the "don't know any better" goes both ways in my experience. After moving from a job using Outlook/Exchange to a job using Gmail and Google Docs, I (and I never thought I was going to say this) really miss Outlook/Exchange. It had it's weaknesses, but Gmail/Docs have so many more of them and seem so lacking in comparison.

            And I'm a year into my new job, so it is not just "time getting adjusted". I increasingly hate working in browser instead of real clients, that has not only better responsiveness an

        • by KGIII ( 973947 ) <uninvolved@outlook.com> on Wednesday December 02, 2015 @01:28AM (#51039087) Journal

          Personally? I'm *very* fond of Thunderbird.

      • Re:Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:04PM (#51035263)

        You have no idea what you are talking about, right? You make it sound like Thunderbird is part of Firefox. It's not. It's a stand-alone application. Try to learn what you are using.

    • Re:Good idea (Score:5, Informative)

      by xombo ( 628858 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:48PM (#51035139)

      Thunderbird is a separate binary package from Firefox. It's not an Add-On. Sure, it uses XUL and the same underlying code. But, it's not like the old days with the whole Mozilla Communicator suite which included Browser, E-mail, Instant Messaging, etc. etc. etc... which was something akin to what their parent company (at the time) AOL was doing with their all-in-one client.

    • Re:Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:18PM (#51035385) Journal

      focusing on making a really good browser is a great idea.

      Except all the effort they've put into Firefox over the past couple years has been making things worse, breaking things, using more resources, copying the worst parts of Chrome, pushing away users and lowering market-share. I'd rather their focus goes elsewhere, until somebody realizes their mistake.

    • by Chas ( 5144 )

      Too late. They're already on the path to Chromezilla and leg-shackling themselves to Google's tools instead of innovating their own.

      So it doesn't really surprise me that these talentless schmucks would try to basically orphan Thunderbird.

    • I agree. Perhaps a browser addon for Thunderbird... :)

  • by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:31PM (#51035033) Homepage Journal
    They had their time, and we've moved on.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      While they're at it, maybe they can put the buttons and menus back in the most ergonomic, common sense position -- where they were in 2005 before "change for the sake of change" became king.

    • by Dracos ( 107777 )

      That time ended when Mitchell Baker stepped down as CEO. Every decision since then has been wrong-headed and self-defeating.

      Even the consideration to divest from Thunderbird is a result of all those bad decisions.

    • They had their time, and we've moved on.

      Which are you referring to here - Firefox or Thunderbird?

      As far as browsers go, on this PC-BSD laptop, I use both Firefox and Chromium. On my Windows 10 laptop, I use Edge, Chrome and IE11. As far as email clients go, I use Thunderbird. Outlook is fine at work but overkill anywhere else, and Windows Mail - the one that comes w/ Windows 10 - is seriously buggy and crashes too much. A lot worse than Outlook Express and Windows Mail (of Vista). KMail seems capable only of POP3, not IMAP, which I found o

  • I'm about to separate myself from the Thunderbird mail client as well, because the performance has gone down the crapper for me in the last year or so. When I hit "archive", the program often hangs for 30 seconds to a minute. Compacting the folder does nothing. I deleted a few years worth of old e-mail to see if that would help, but seriously, a modern program should not be choking on a few hundred MB of e-mails.

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Have you tried the "Empty Junk" option? That one will lock you up for a minute or two.

      My question is, what do I use as an alternative? Don't say Gmail, I hate it.

      • by Scoth ( 879800 )

        I've had decent luck with The Bat! and eM Client. Neither is quite free and both have some annoying quirks, but so far they've worked a little better than Thunderbird for me. The Bat! looks a bit outdated and has bit of old-school Eudora going on, but it works well enough. eM Client is going more for the modern flat look and more modern design, but has some annoyances with their "free license" and multiple devices.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Unlike the Firefox "browser", Thunderbird is actually kind of useful as an application.

    The Mozilla fpundation should just disband and leave their stuff for adults to handle. If there still is someone willing.

  • by sims 2 ( 994794 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:44PM (#51035111)

    It's probably a good thing.
    Seeing as how mozilla has lost their minds and are tearing out core features of firefox just because they can.

    • Here's my theory (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think I know what happened, and it's more logistical than technical. The new batch of developers didn't write the old code (no matter how good it was), and the new batch of managers didn't make the old decisions (no matter how good they were). As a developer, one is typically partial to one's own creations. (It's my baby now.) And as a manager, one is typically partial to one's own policies. (It's my troop now.)

      My hunch is simply that the major direction changes in firefox/thunderbird coincided with the r

      • When Firefox was new it was considered a controversial skunkworks project. The idea that Mozilla might not be an integrated suite anymore upset a lot of the existing users, believe it or not, especially as Firefox bore a rather strong resemblance to the primary competitor at the time..... Internet Explorer.

        Firefox is caught between the rock and the hard place that many products get stuck in: a competitor comes along that leapfrogs them with a design that appeals to the majority of the market. But it also i

    • Seamonkey is better anyway.. All we need now is SeamonkeyOS (SOS), and the machine will be complete, better than Chrome...

  • <sarcasm> (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fph il quozientatore ( 971015 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:47PM (#51035131)
    Smart move. Laying off unknown niche products such as Thunderbird, and focusing on widely used projects such as Firefox OS. Way to go, Mozilla, I am sure that's the road to success.
    • This also saves them from having to create and maintain common tools / libraries / objects / etc., which always takes WAY more time and effort than just reinventing the wheel. It also gives their hard-working build farm a break from the obnoxious overload of needing to build *two* projects, instead of sitting idle and cooling off.

  • SeaMonkey (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So, a community-supported Thunderbird, just like SeaMonkey? Offload everything to the community. The community then spends 80 % of its time figuring out how to fix the build breakages MozCorp introduced this month.

    And then their build infrastructure gets 'best-effort' support treatment from Mozilla and then they have to wait half a year to get a OS / compiler upgrade [seamonkey-project.org] before they can get a Windows build working.

    I'm not treating this as welcome news.

    (Incidentally, SeaMonkey's mail client is pretty tightly cou

    • Well, maybe the first step would be to simplify the code base and the build process?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You need to build Gecko, you need to build libxul. About 95 % of the code of both SM and TB come from those two 'libraries'. And both of those are Mozilla's turf. The builds of Gecko/libxul are the ones breaking, not anything from the SM / TB side.

        How do you propose to simplify that? Do you propose ripping them out, from a product built on them?

  • by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

    As someone who uses both at home (where its my choice), I honestly don't see what integration there currently is now.

    They are completely separate executables. Perhaps under the scenes they use some common UI code, but if so its not anything I ever interact with. So I really don't see what it benefits me, as a user of either or both, that they are under the same umbrella.

    • by jopsen ( 885607 )

      They are completely separate executables. Perhaps under the scenes they use some common UI code, but if so its not anything I ever interact with. So I really don't see what it benefits me, as a user of either or both, that they are under the same umbrella.

      Probably some HTML rendering code. JS engine... I suspect thunderbird still uses XUL and other things...

      • So... some shared libraries. Isn;'t that what shared libraries are for?

        • Re:And? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:22PM (#51035415) Homepage Journal

          Isn;'t that what shared libraries are for?

          Yes, provided that upstream can be bothered to keep a stable ABI in the shared libraries.

        • Re:And? (Score:4, Informative)

          by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:24PM (#51035435)

          They want to murder XUL, because they think XUL is outdated and HTML5 is the best of the world, and implementing a small layer for servo will be too complicated and too big of a project to do it, so now they are "cutting the cords". First they announced that add-ons can't use XUL, then they killed xulrunner (which got not that much media attention), and now they want to get rid of thunderbird too. All because they think XUL is a bad technology and its all doable by HTML5 and javascript these days. Totally fogetting that HTML + js just needs a huge overhead to get native looking UI dialogs, and that XUL had tons of APIs accessible from javascript, all not accessible from the HTML platform.

          • by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

            Totally fogetting that ... XUL had tons of APIs accessible from javascript, all not accessible from the HTML platform.

            But do I want that? Allowing code on websites to muck with my browser's UI toolkit sounds like a really bad idea. Guaranteed first thing some a-hole is gonna do is use it to get around my browser's "no popups" settings.

            • Yeah, right. Website code never really had access to the XUL layer. XUL is reserved for trusted code like Add-ons, or when you want to write an application in an XML+js like environment.

  • LibreOffice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tim Locke ( 137705 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:52PM (#51035163) Homepage
    Would the LIbreOffice project be interested in picking up Thunderbird? After all Microsoft Office has Outlook.
    • Would the LIbreOffice project be interested in picking up Thunderbird? After all Microsoft Office has Outlook.

      I made the mistake of trying Evolution once. What a PoS. T-Bird/Lightning would be a good addition to the Libre suite.

    • They'd do better to pick up SeaMonkey, which is more similar to Outlook than Thunderbird is. Thunderbird is more like an Outlook Express
    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @05:45PM (#51036889)

      FossaMail [fossamail.org] is a fork of Thunderbird made by the Pale Moon guys.

      You are using Pale Moon [palemoon.org] instead of Firefox, aren't you?

  • by Steve1952 ( 651150 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:53PM (#51035179)
    I am rather amazed that in a post-Snowden world, everyone is just totally fine with doing away with Thunderbird -- arguably one of the most important open source email systems out there. However I do understand why some large companies, such as Google (gmail) and Microsoft (outlook), might want to get rid of the competition. By the way, who is funding Mozilla these days?
    • some large companies, such as Google (gmail) and Microsoft (outlook), might want to get rid of the competition

      How is gmail (an email provider, with a web UI) competition to Thunderbird (an email client)?

      I use Thunderbird to read and send emails on my gmail account; pretty sure I'm not the only one.

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        How is gmail (an email provider, with a web UI) competition to Thunderbird (an email client)?

        Gmail's web interface as an interface to Gmail is competition for Thunderbird as an interface to Gmail.

        I use Thunderbird to read and send emails on my gmail account

        That depends on how long Google continues to offer Gmail access through other clients without charge.

        • Gmail's web interface can only be accessed by opening a browser: there is no specific gmail client of Google's, outside Android (haven't checked the Windows store). As for offering IMAP access free of charge, I don't see Google discontinuing that as long as one still has several similar offerings from Microsoft and Yahoo! Only thing I wonder is whether AOL still has that.
    • I use Mutt.

  • Nastily couched in modern ExecSpeak...one team "spends much of their time" whilst the other "pays a tax"...
    Pointy-haired bosses everywhere must be pulling on their weasels in delight at such utter crap.
    So yes, let Mozilla go (under), Thunderbird team, and try and get things back to when you actually had a decent mail client.
    Better still, find a way for Windows/Mac/Nix users to swap encrypted emails easily and maybe you'll even make some market share.
    Partner with one of the "secure" email providers?

    • There are no "providers of secure email", by definition, if it's running on someone else's hardware, it's not secure.

      There's already an easy encrypted mail plugin for Thunderbird - Enigmail - for all three platforms that uses GPG. The only hard part is key management, and with public key servers available, even that's not as hard as it was - exchange keys, verify the signatures on a phone call, and get mailing.

  • by gQuigs ( 913879 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @01:57PM (#51035215) Homepage

    They made a new HTML/Javascript email client for Firefox OS, why not work on converging the features so one email client can scale from mobile to desktop?

    • That would be the equivalent of just killing Thunderbird outright for me. There's no way an HTML/Javascript implementation could be nearly as good.

  • She says many within Mozilla want to see it support community-managed projects

    So people within Mozilla want to spend money on things that are not Mozilla. That sounds suspiciously like wasting money.

  • by sremick ( 91371 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:05PM (#51035271)

    Am I the only person left who actually LIKES and used Thunderbird?

    Enough of the "just use webmail" crap. I do in an emergency, but on established computers I live on regularly, you can't beat the better power, speed and versatility of a native email application running locally. I get far more-features in Thunderbird than my email provider's lightweight and simple web interface.

    Plus Thunderbird is cross-platform and available on my variety on mixed-OS computers, giving me a consistent local-app email experience across them all.

    But I suppose a good portion of the email-app-haters are the same ones as email-haters who would rather use IM, SMS and Facebook messaging rather than proper email. Get off my lawn... some of us actually use the internet for work too, not just play.

    • Admittedly Windows-only, but I've personally become a *huge* fan of eM Client [emclient.com]. Super fast, incredibly stable, works flawlessly with both IMAP and Exchange, nice interface, fast searches, simple data imports, extremely small system footprint (even smaller than Thunderbird), and if the free version doesn't cut it, $50 is a very reasonable asking price for the commercial/supported version.

      Now, where Thunderbird still wins out is cross-platform compatibility, NNTP support, and its open source, so I'm not saying

    • by Nite_Hawk ( 1304 )

      I still use Thunderbird too. Despite how slow it can be, it's still the best GUI client I've been able to find after all of these years.

    • by SteveSgt ( 3465 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:27PM (#51035473)

      What SRemick said.

      AFAICT, the only people who like using webmail are people who don't actually rely on email.

      Nobody can do this (yet) with a lame webmail client, nor even very well with Apple Mail nor Outlook:
      - Manage six or more email accounts, with hundreds of mailbox folders
      - Run rules or scripts automatically shuffling low-priority mail into those folders like discussion mailing lists, server error messages, and assorted bulk email that you personally don't classify as spam
      - Receive mail in one inbox, and reply to extended threads with quotes from another

      I won't even touch on digital signing and encryption.

      Then there's the whole bit about who owns and have access to your email. I haven't personally read all of the fine print in Google's, Apple's, nor Microsoft's email service terms-of-service documents, but I suspect you're not guaranteed anywhere near the meager protection your money gets in a checking account.

      What other cross-platform options are there? Nobody seems to be making any suggestions.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by xxdelxx ( 551872 )

      Nope - I use it extensively. As someone who gets emails on many different channels depending on who is sending them I want an offline aggregator. And no - I don't want to delegate that to Google.

      I'd happily try any other multi-platform solution to this but so far Thunderbird, despite its limitations, is the best I've found. I'm open to argument though.

    • by dremon ( 735466 )
      Doubleplusgood. It has GPG/PKI security, calendar/task extension with 3rd-party Exchange connector, best in class IMAP support, speed, stability, rich set of extensions - not a single sucking webclient is even remotely close to offer this combination of productivity, privacy and features. And it is cross-platform. As I am using Linux most of the time I tried many available email clients - all of them suck BADLY comparing to TB.
    • by PvtVoid ( 1252388 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:32PM (#51035517)

      Nope. For example, I run my own IMAP server, and access via Thunderbird (or K-9 on my Android device). I'm not sure why TFA calls the product "anachronistic". What should it do in 2015 that it doesn't?

    • Nope, I use Thunderbird for email - Outlook is just intolerable. Since the Exchange calendar plugin got taken over by Eriksson, even that is pretty good.

    • > Am I the only person left who actually LIKES and used Thunderbird?

      Nope -- the problem is "webmail" is good enough for most people; We're a dying (technical) breed. Not enough people care about having a good, fast, stable, email client. :-/ Just look at how many people's eyes roll over when you mention something like PGP. They use the ignorant and naive excuse "But I have nothing to hide" ...

    • I like Thunderbird. It's not the best mailreader I've ever used, but it's the best I've found for my current use case.

    • I'm not even aware of any proper alternative (besides Outlook, which is obviously shit).

      I moved from Eudora to Thunderbird and have been looking for something else because of this news, but it seems there is absolutely nothing. Recommendations welcome.

      • by SumDog ( 466607 )

        Same here. As I'm reading, yours in one of two comments with the word "alternative" in it. I'd like another option. It looks like the only other thing out there is Evolution?! Man..so lame.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I too love Thunderbird. It automatically configures most of the major free email services - Google, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, et al. What's even better - and this Webmail can't do - I can take an email that's been sent to one account and move it to another account. Do it a lot when people send me mails to the 'wrong' email. That's something I haven't been able to do in Outlook Express when I used to run XP
    • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      There are others of us!

      I just moved 2 people to it. 1 from MS Outlook, and the other from Apple Mail. They both want private email on their own domains, but those domains don't offer the greatest webmail apps. They don't want to forward their email through Google to use their webmail. Microsoft Outlook is becoming too hard for me to support. The other moved to Windows. So Thunderbird + IMAP it is! One even paid a monthly fee to increase their web site storage capacity so they can keep all their mail o

  • imo, it would be good news, if it does occur. I'd hate to see Mozilla mess up Thunderbird as they have messed up Firefox.
  • I don't see a lot of complaining about this latest move by Mozilla, Inc.
  • by CaptainOfSpray ( 1229754 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:22PM (#51035419)
    When advising users who want to leave Windows, I tell them to install T-bird, let it import all their emails and address book from , and copy the result to Linux, when T-bird picks it up and uses it in a "It Just Works" manner. I have never seen another migration that was so effortless. You may understand that I don't want T-bird to disappear, or updating to stop, because there needs to be a painless way to get your stuff out of the hands of the Beast.
    • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      I used to triple-boot Windows, Linux, OS X. I put my email on an NTFS partition that all 3 OSs could read, and Thunderbird could work flawlessly across all 3 platforms. It was great.

  • by JohnFen ( 1641097 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:37PM (#51035551)

    I agree with the sentiment, although for reasons that probably differ from Mozilla's. Mozilla has been mismanaging and making Firefox an increasingly undesirable browser. That Mozilla has pretty much been ignoring Thunderbird has meant that it has escaped much of the awfulness they have been inflicting on Firefox.

    Formally making the two completely independent would be welcome to me because it would further insulate Thunderbird from the actions of Mozilla.

  • by BradMajors ( 995624 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:43PM (#51035615)

    This is really a desire of Mozillia to separate Thunderbird from Mozillia's money. Mozillia has lots of income from Google. Thunderbird has no independent source of money and could not survive independently without Mozillia's money.

  • by Hydrian ( 183536 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @03:03PM (#51035773) Homepage

    I do think Firefox and Thunderbird need to separate. There purposes are very different and they don't need a whole lot inter connectivity to each other. Thunderbird itself needs some restructuring in it's scope. That's the real problem with the Thunderbird project. Thunderbird needs to bite the bullet and be come a full PIM... yes like Outlook.

    When do you ever JUST need e-mail. Just being an e-mail client is too limiting. E-mail, calendaring, tasks, contacts are so closely connecting nowadays. It is very hard to separate any of those and have them work well together. Thunderbird is still holding on to that though and it is hampering its development.

    Yes I know there is lightning but it often feels like it is a half-backed hack. Thunderbird needs to connect itself with official support (or start it's own) open-source groupware server. I know there many out there but most of them have partial support at best.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I know many accountants who use Thunderbird (whole companies, as a matter of fact). They want to be able to access their email offline, and Thunderbird is safe and easy to use. All of them (4 companies, over 15 people) happened to move from Outlook to Thunderbird by just trying different email clients. They were not recommended Thunderbird by a FLOSS advocate or anything like that. Which is interesting.

    This does not mean that Mozilla should not drop it: sure, focusing on FFox might be a good thing. I'm just

  • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @03:34PM (#51035995)

    It's about money. If there's no kickback from Google or Yahoo, Mozilla foundation doesn't want to be bothered with it. It's no longer about being useful, you see.

  • by mx+b ( 2078162 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @05:55PM (#51036971)

    Mozilla, I have actually donated to you in the past, but I have to admit my faith and continued donations are really starting to waiver lately.

    Don't get me wrong; its not because of the Australis and UI changes that many people complain about. I actually enjoy those changes, the cross-platform consistency it brought. That's not the issue.

    The issue to me is that I feel like you're slowly abandoning your principles:

    • Incorporation of 3rd party proprietary services such as Pocket and Hello (the calling through Telefonica) seem to give up on principles of open source and control of data
    • Including ads in my new tab window is annoying, and possibly a privacy/security risk depending on where those ads are sourced from (they're not hosted on mozilla servers I'd guess; so do you trust the servers you're pulling from?).
    • Support of the DRM plugins/codecs for video. I know the argument was that you didn't really want to do it but were forced to, but how about principles? What can we do as a movement to try to push for open codecs again? I haven't received email updates on what you're doing to support that.
    • Now, giving up on Thunderbird, which is not just well known and liked, but I think its key selling point is ENCRYPTED PRIVATE email. By necessity, you can't do crypto (encrypted and signed emails) unless its in a mail client. If you want to send a webclient your private key, you're missing the point.

    If you need money, tell us how it is. Lay out your plan for the next 3 years (a very specific vision!), estimate a figure of money, and maybe we can crowdsource it to happen. I think people are less likely to donate if they can't get clarity into what the money is used for (I know I'm that way).

    I think that plan/vision needs to say more specifics like: we're campaigning against all kinds of ads, especially ones that track you and hurt your privacy; we're abandoning 3rd party proprietary things built in to our browser; we're re-focusing on our needs on your security and privacy. We're going to have the most secure browser on the planet, implementing the following list of protocols and standards, we're researching some new protocols and standards and working with the community on them. We're going 64 bit on Windows to take full advantage of performance and security extensions in modern OSes. We're going to make crypto more easy and transparent, both TLS in the browser, but especially we're going to refocus our efforts on Thunderbird and making your email safe with built in idiot-proof PGP encryption and signing. We're also going to work with web vendors to start implementing their own encryption, meaning when you get a notice from your bank, we expect it to be signed by your bank's encryption key and it all happens automagically to keep you safe.

    If I don't start seeing more concrete things like this working for the betterment of the internet and my security and privacy on the internet, then my donation dollars will start looking for other projects. I want to know you're working for me, and not using me only to generate money.

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