Mozilla said that email client doesn't have a future

Mar 2, 2015 12:29 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla changed the development priority for Thunderbird a few years ago and said back then that it was no longer investing resources into an e-mail client, which they said would no longer be relevant. Now it looks that Thunderbird adoption is on the rise despite Mozilla's predictions.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a very famous e-mail client, especially in the Linux world where there aren't too many competitors for it. To be fair, Thunderbird is not the only application of its kind on Linux, but it's probably the best. A few other solutions are being developed as we speak, but they are nowhere near the level of features you can find in Thunderbird.

A lot of people were very sad to see that Mozilla has nefarious intentions with Thunderbird. They switched the development model to "Extended Support Releases," which mean that it's was basically sideline and only patched for security problems. New features would be added by a team of developers from the online community, doing this kind of work for free. From the looks of it, Thunderbird adoption in on rise, which kind of proves that Mozilla was actually wrong.

Thunderbird is on the rise

When Mozilla said that Thunderbird and e-mail clients, in general, are doomed to a slow and uninteresting death, many users believed it. We have watched in silence how new Firefox releases are made each couple of months and how Thunderbird was lagging behind.

On the other hand, something interesting happened. The developers from the online community started to push some update for the application and it got better. So much so, that its popularity is growing, much more than anyone could have anticipated.

"We're happy to report that Thunderbird usage continues to expand. Mozilla measures program usage by Active Daily Installations (ADI), which is the number of pings that Mozilla servers receive as installations do their daily plugin block-list update. This is not the same as the number of active users, since some users don’t access their program each day, and some installations are behind firewalls. An estimate of active monthly users is typically done by multiplying the ADI by a factor of 3," wrote the developers on the official blog.

In fact, when you finish adding up all the numbers, you'll see that it's about 9.2 million. And then you have to multiply this number by 3. How many projects wouldn't want a 27 million user base?

Thunderbird adoption
Thunderbird adoption

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