Thunderbird 3Why?

What.

How...

Super Fast Intro

• Thunderbird history in 60 seconds

• who we are, what we do

Successful messaging innovation is happening in centralized models

IMAP, POP, SMTP endangered

HTTP does not mean open

Decentralized innovation anduser-level hackability matters

Closed email systems are winningData ownership matters

Why Thunderbird matters

What to do?

Thunderbird is good, and precious

What could make it better?

I thought so...

Scope of work ahead daunting

How should we prioritize work?

adding/changing features(growing market)

• removing features

• centralized configuration is expensive!

• my bug fix is your regression

• “ the way that [...] works means it's not an easy fix, IIRC”

fixing bugs(higher quality)

Scary Facts

AAARGH!

>0.5 MLOC

Thousands of bugs across three layers(thunderbird, mailnews, gecko)

• 5-10M users

• 5-10 devs

• 2-3 QAs

Still...• With effort and patience, lots of improvements possible

• It’s just code

• The opportunity for impact makes people do crazy things

Thunderbird 3What

• Based on Gecko 1.9.1 (== Firefox 3.1)

• Platform upgrade

• UX improvements

When

• Ship as soon as possible & ready

Platform Update

• Firefox 3.0/3.1 improvements

• JavaScript faster

• XUL more stable

• Looks better

• Add-on manager

User Experience

• optimize high-use paths

• reflect modern realities (disks, bandwidth)

• autosync, delete, archive, add to addressbook

Auto-configuration:

• the hardest problem of all: getting started

• we can help 90+% of users a lot

• user experience trumps code simplicity

• the data we collect can be used by all email clients

Bigger UX vision• Learn from evolution of messaging in

last 10 years (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter...)

• Aim for the largest market possible, not just technophiles

• Preserve key values

• openness, extensibility, accessibility

Civilians think in terms of conversations with people, not

servers, accounts, folders, protocols, ports

• These are cultural changes.

• Cultural changes are hard.

Making contributing easier

• Cleaner, higher-level APIs

• JS APIs rather than C++ APIs

• Making room: moving specialized functionality to extensions

• Help needed!

Gloda: a powerful message DB

• Architecture

• Concepts

• Strengths & weaknesses

• Case study

SQLite & JavaScript

converstationsidentities messages

collections async

+ simple+ extensible

+ ajax-compliant- young

MIT Timeline1 plane flight

demo

experiments

• New models to provide interactions that:

• requires less from the user

• integrate with how users work elsewhere

• Experimental toolbar

• conversation & person based search results

• tabs for state management

Bigger themes

• Sorting is not the smarter search

• Conversations, not trees

• Tags are richer than folders

• Protocols are not how people think about communications

Hacking for a product with a significant market

A successful contributor has

• motivation

• balance of community fit and personal drive

• ego in check

• satisfaction from shared outcome, not personal glory

GETT INGINVOLVED

Helping with bugs• 30+ bugs / day need more info, triage,

dupe

• Bug followup

• more info needed, verification

• Untouched 10-year old bugs

• Work with others:

• Test days, Bug days

With more time & passion

• Writing automated tests

• JavaScript is all you need

• Patches!

• developer.mozilla.org

• Extension development

• Learn how it all works

Helping non-en_US

• Localization, obviously

• new website for mozillamessaging.com!

• Support sites per locale

Experimentationthrough add-ons

Futures & Challenges

• Linux distros, netbooks

• Mobile

• How to leverage the web?

• Calendaring options

• Everyone wants your address book - and you want it everywhere.

Thank you

dascher@mozillamessaging.com

ludovic@mozillamessaging.com