[selfhoster11]

For the record, I disagree with the assessment that they should be building an Electron email client. Most users are already using a paid/monetised Electron email client, a soon to become Electron client (like is supposedly planned for Microsoft Outlook), or a webmail interface.

Electron clients cannot compete on deep technically obscure feature sets, simply because they didn't have 20 years to accumulate them. They cannot compete on latency. Thunderbird should remain native.

[iggldiggl]

> Thunderbird should remain native.

Er, you do realise that Thunderbird isn't exactly native, either, what with it being based on XUL (or whatever's still left of that these days) and Gecko?

[smorgusofborg]

I think you are using dichotomies inappropriately to invoke the standard biases that have trapped the Mozilla community.

Something that competes with electron is not electron. Non-native includes RLBox which is now going to secure Firefox according to Mozilla. Mozilla is on record regretting thunderbird's poor Integration with the Firefox stack as a trial for thunderbird devs and a tax slowing Firefox engineering.

This holding pattern has gone on and on because no one wants to establish the correct API layer to maintain as an inherent tax for Firefox engineering that enables all F/OSS to reuse the NS* stack correctly with good documentation.

In the long term this means chromium has an ecosystem and Mozilla's stable ecosystem consists of just one browser. However flawed chromium is, it has no competition for most developers and competition with WebKit for a handful.