Mozilla’s desktop email customer, Thunderbird, does not have anywhere hold of the firm’s Firefox browser. So far, even in this era of web-based email services, it still possesses a widespread user community. For 2019, this user community can expect for a more rapid and more attractive application, Ryan Sipes, Community Manager, Thunderbird, announced this week.
Just a few years back, Mozilla’s association with Thunderbird seemed rather rocky. In 2015, the firm made a decision to disconnect Thunderbird’s technical infrastructure from Firefox and search for other firms that might show interest to invest in it. In the end, though, Mozilla chose to keep Thunderbird in-house and not shift it to another firm and continue to provide backing to the project. This decision offered Thunderbird just much-needed steadiness and, as announced by Sipes recently, now, there are about eight full-time individuals working on the project. He also disclosed plans to hire six more people very soon.
On a similar note, Microsoft recently announced that it is working with Google to take Chrome’s local ARM64 version to Windows 10 on ARM. And as Mozilla announced this week, the firm, too, is in the process to take Firefox’s local version to Windows 10 on ARM. This will be done in collaboration with Qualcomm.
Usually, to make any Windows 10 application work on ARM-based devices, Microsoft employs numerous emulation methods. Those methods are found to be working well. However, they do invite both performance and power cost. Local applications obviously do not require any emulation, so they work faster and more proficiently, provided that browsers are amongst the most-employed applications. It is no surprise that the key browser vendors are showing their interest in presenting the best backing for the platform, even if we are still discussing a very minute role for the time being.