Do note that Thunderbird can afford to keep a relatively tiny team (compared to Firefox) because it stands on the shoulder of giants (Firefox) for its UI and HTML renderer. That Thunderbird is able to cover its expenses with donations really doesn't prove that Firefox will also be able to do so, but that doesn't excuse Mozilla from not even trying.
> failed side project after failed side project
Rust and MDN have been huge successes. Their mobile OS is still alive and kicking, although other people are making money from that now. They also put in a ton of resources into decreasing FF memory footprint as part of the failed mobile OS effort, which benefits all of us.
> Do note that Thunderbird can afford to keep a relatively tiny team (compared to Firefox) because it stands on the shoulder of giants (Firefox) for its UI and HTML renderer.
Also, and mainly, because that's a lot less of a moving target.
- there's not much that's new to email, there are some recent ideas like jmap but they're not exactly hard requirements
- UI requirements are largely fixed and a pretty minor concern
- and between web clients and completely broken ones (cough cough outlook) email HTML rendering is pretty damn far from any sort of leading edge
The big question is why anything there has to be an income stream.
If there are users, and there is a need, we should directly furnish the project with a bunch of hired employees rather than indirectly pay some manager, rely on charity or ads.
I guess they are talking about KaiOS, which had initial success, shipping on more 100M devices in India. Unfortunately they have been struggling to expand outside of India and even in India these days since their partner (Reliance Jio) is not pushing new devices there so much.
Another major pain point is they lost support from WhatsApp, which is really the king maker in many countries when it comes to mass market adoption of a mobile platform.
> failed side project after failed side project
Rust and MDN have been huge successes. Their mobile OS is still alive and kicking, although other people are making money from that now. They also put in a ton of resources into decreasing FF memory footprint as part of the failed mobile OS effort, which benefits all of us.