Email was the only other useful part. Thunderbird is not exactly dead, just forgotten. I still run it, since I de-googled, though sadly it's also turning into bloatware.

Netscape had a chat thing, html publisher, and I think something else.

WebRTC, pocket, the webIDE, even things like the dom inspector, style editor etc and pdf are bloat for most mortals. Perfect for some "official" plugins. They managed it for the FF OS simulator.

It's all optional crap that increases bloat and attack surface, except it's not optional.

Why is WebRTC bloat? A lot of people us it for video calls nowadays. Pocket is a neat solution for avoiding having lots of tabs eating your memory, which in turn ends up causing page swapping and messing with your experience.

"pdf are bloat for most mortals"

That's alright, it means in 99% cases it's just a very small javascript file on your disk. No harm done.

Bloat is relative and subjective. I've never used WebRTC, Pocket, or Loop/Hello, so I'd consider them bloat. On the other hand, I need to deal with PDFs fairly frequently, so it's convenient to have a browser that supports them. Someone else is going to have different requirements. I don't have a problem with that, but I'd prefer to have an option to disable or remove the features that I don't need or want.

I'd say the situation now is about the same as it was then. Only the context has changed. Communicator had a mail client and a news client. I used them both over dial-up, back in the day. If enough people still wanted newsreaders, you can bet Mozilla would write one.

Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.

I used Thunderbird daily for the better part of a decade until about 3 months ago. It's nothing personal against the project, which is currently the best serious desktop mail client available afaik. It's simply that Mozilla doesn't care about it anymore since everyone uses webmail now. Thunderbird is doing feature releases about once a year now [0], and Mozilla has pulled most (all?) of its full-time developers [1]. A few months ago, Mitchell Baker sent a message that said they were looking to detach Mozilla from the project completely, partially because it didn't have enough industry-wide impact to be worth Mozilla's resources [2].

The sad fact is that desktop mail clients are going away, and even the big projects like Thunderbird are barely limping along, which I guess is slightly nicer terminology than "pretty much dead"?

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/

[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from...

Call me a dinosaur, but I'll keep using it as long as it is available. Web email clients SUCK.

And there's about 10 million users that evidently have a reason to keep using it:

https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/12/thunderbird-act...

This sounds like my words.:D

So I completely agree. I cringe every time I am forced to use webmail for some reason.

What makes an email client so difficult to write? I don't mean this to sound insulting, I just really don't understand where the complexity is. It seems like you should be able to get to a point where it is feature complete and all development efforts shift to maintenance mode. Or maybe I don't understand what's been going on with Thunderbird and perhaps it's been "done" for years now.

It is basically done. There could be UI refinements and updates to the occasional protocol/security change, but yeah, there's not been much innovation in email standards for a while.

Although, to be honest, email standards are a complete mess in some regards and I suppose this make such an endeavour not as trivial as it looks on first sight.

Just an example: try to create (and use) an IDN-based email address with non-ASCII characters in the local part. You will be amazed how incompatible on so many layers this actually is. I can hardly imagine there weren't dozens of similarly tricky situations where the developers of this, or any other email client for that matter, were forced to make quite serious design choices because of either ambiguity in standards, or widespread lack of support thereof.

You should try Nylas N1

I don't like the fact that it uses an external API. I don't like a third party (other than my mail host) to have access to my email password and messages.

Mozilla has terminated development IIRC. This is probably what was meant.

Thanks. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic although it surely looks like it when I read it now. I was genuinely interested to find out about it since it's a program I rely on and if it won't be developed further, I'll have to look for alternatives.