They've already neglected Thunderbird for years, and now they want to start from scratch? Doesn't sound like a good idea. Sounds more like another project they will shut down after a while.

I used to use both Thunderbird and Firefox a few years ago as my main mail client and browser. Since then, Mozilla started spreading between too many projects, chasing the failed phone thing, and both Firefox and even worse Thunderbird are nowhere near where their competitors are.

I now use Google Chrome and Google Inbox (via Electron app Wavebox, formerly WMail), and they actually look from this century. I downloaded Thunderbird a few months ago out of nostalgia, and everything looks the same as 5 years ago. Pretty sad.

I think Thunderbird is fine how it is. I think a lot of the projects Mozilla takes on are stupid (Rust being a giant exception, I love Rust).

You know what I want? NWJS/Electron but using Firefox/Spidermonkey. I want to package desktop apps with Firefox. They almost had this with xulrunner but killed it for some reason. And I want them to build crosswalk (https://crosswalk-project.org/) for mobile, but with Firefox. The only real reason is that I don't trust Google or anything they touch, and I've never actually been able to build Chromium/NWJS from source (such a complicated build), which worries me.

Call me paranoid, but the monoculture around Chromium creeps me out and I'd really like a viable alternative from Mozilla. Seems like they jumped ship from the packaged HTML5 desktop/mobile app paradigm right when it started getting popular.