Thunderbird 115 “Supernova”: New interface presents developers with challenges

Thunderbird 115 “Supernova”, a completely new version of the e-mail client, is to be released this summer. On the blog, the developers go into the challenges and explain why you have to start from scratch with the interface too. Thunderbird is currently a fragile Lego tower.

At the end of last year, the MZLA Technologies Corporation, which was spun off from the Mozilla Foundation, announced that it would be launching a completely new version of Thunderbird in summer 2023 want to publish. In a recent blog post, they are more specific and declare July of this year as the target for the release of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova”. The release would thus coincide with the 20th anniversary of the email client.

Three primary goals should be achieved

Thunderbird is to be completely overhauled with “Supernova” on the visual and technical side. The developers want to get rid of the legacy of the last ten years, which is making the project sluggish and repeatedly leading to complications. This task is not easy, but it is necessary to ensure the future viability of Thunderbird for the next 20 years. The developers have set a number of primary goals for the next three years.

The code base of the e-mail client is to be rewritten to be much leaner and more reliable, old code is to be rewritten and technical legacies are to be removed. In addition, the interface is to be rebuilt from scratch and receive a uniform design system. However, an adaptive and extremely adaptable interface should also be developed and maintained. The third primary goal is to move to monthly releases. Within these goals there are hundreds of giant steps that need to happen in order to achieve everything as planned. The developers explain that this requires a great deal of time and resources.

Thunderbird behaves like a fragile Lego tower

The background is that Thunderbird in its current state is something like a fragile Lego tower on which more and more stones were placed, although a central component further down in the tower actually had the wrong shape. Larger changes to the app cannot simply be added to this tower as additional floors; instead, stone by stone must be removed, the foundation renewed and then the rebuilding started with other stones because the old ones no longer fit.

Thunderbird is literally “a bunch of code” running on Firefox. Tabs and areas in the app are just browser tabs with a customized interface. One “loves” Firefox as the basis for the e-mail client because it gives you cross-platform support and elements such as the Gecko web renderer or the Spidermonkey JavaScript compiler. Thunderbird can attach itself to the releases of Firefox and, among other things, receive its security updates. With a lot of C++, JS, CSS and XHTML, there is of course more going on in the background, but according to the developers, Firefox is the perfect starting point for Thunderbird.

It couldn't keep up with Firefox

However, there is a high price to be paid for this approach. While Thunderbird is maintained by a little more than a dozen developers in the still relatively young MZLA Technologies Corporation, Firefox has hundreds of developers who bring changes to the project every day. Several times a week things would break in Thunderbird simply because a C++ interface was renamed, an API became obsolete, or a library was updated. Just keeping up with the upstream changes occupies most of the day for Thunderbird developers.

Criticism too at the Mozilla Foundation

In this context, it was not helpful that the Mozilla Foundation shifted its focus in 2012 and switched Thunderbird to a community-maintained model involving community members and external contributors. This decision was both a curse and a blessing, because the community sparked passionate collaboration, but coordination was challenging and, in the long term, there were not enough resources available for an open source project of this size that was maintained in this way . We are very grateful for the immense cooperation, but at the same time the many volunteers with their different tastes, especially in the design, led to an inconsistent interface without a coherent user experience. The irregular upstream synchronization with Firefox has also led to release pauses in Thunderbird, sometimes lasting several months.

MZLA Technologies bring back necessary structure

Within MZLA Technologies Corporation, Thunderbird now has full-time paid employees, proper organization, a roadmap, and people making smart decisions and leading the way. This was a bit of a shock for the community, especially in the period from 2017 to 2020, because changes had to be approved from then on. A stricter feature roadmap and prioritization now results in contributions being rejected outright if they don't meet the project's needs and visual objective. It is understandable that community members can feel rejected as a result, but these steps were necessary.

Thunderbird continues to be “open” and open source, but while communicating openly with the community, for example to share mock-ups and changes with them in advance, and to continue to make all source code available, decisions are now made at internal meetings. Thunderbird is run like “a normal company” so that chief developers, chief designers, project and product managers, senior engineers, etc. make the final decisions. The impression should not be created that the primary developers don't care about the community or that something is only done because it is “trendy”, nothing could be further from the truth. However, the recovered structure is necessary for the success of Thunderbird.

The project and the development are progressing successfully

This year, Thunderbird has already evolved into a viable project, receiving many donations and planning more services to boost sales. In addition, the team of permanent developers and designers is growing. You can slowly part with the old code base, use modern development methods, use a uniform programming style with documentation and eliminate many problems. For the next two years, improvements will be made to the UI and UX, which should attract both new users and loyal users of the app. Ease of use and accessibility are other issues that the project wants to address. Thunderbird aims to be nothing less than the best personal and professional communication application.

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