[hunvreus]

I spent a good deal of time dealing with XUL, heck I even helped with the French community. Designing UI was a ton more robust with it than with HTML, but XULrunner was (and still is from what I saw) not the most pleasant beast to run.

I'm not advocating a rewrite for the sake of novelty, but they're part of a product life cycle.

You mentioned that it would mean dropping some features. I think that's a good thing; an opportunity to cut the fat and make sure only what is proven and useful makes its way back into Firefox.

You seem to think volunteers won't pick up the maintenance of Thunderbird; if so then why should Mozilla care about it?

Now, I don't think HTML, CSS and JS are the best technologies. They each suck in their own way. But they are winning, and Mozilla is merely embracing that.