19 February 2008, 11:04

Mozilla Messaging to coordinate development of Thunderbird

Mozilla Messaging is the name of the Mozilla Foundation's subsidiary founded in September to coordinate the development of the Thunderbird 3 e-mail client. David Ascher will head the Mozilla subsidiary along with his colleagues Christopher Beard, Vice President and General Manager of Mozilla Labs, and Marten Mickos, head of MySQL AB. The goal of the company is to set up a stable developer community with a few members as full-time employees.

In 2008, Ascher plans to complete a version of Thunderbird with an integrated calendar application called Lightning, as announced in his weblog. In addition, search functions are to be improved, configuration simplified, and the user interface overhauled. Progress in the implementation of these plans is to be made public to the extent possible.

The head of Mozilla Messaging also has plans that go beyond the release of Thunderbird 3. They include the integration of Web technologies beyond e-mails to include other communication channels such as instant messaging, video IP, weblogs, and SMS. At the end of January, Ascher announced that Thunderbird code would have to be freed of a few "scary bits."

(jbe)

« previous | next »

Print Version | Send by email | Permalink: http://h-online.com/-734265