End of Life of Thunderbird 3
Mark Banner
expectation is that the Thunderbird 3.0.10 release will be the last
security release for the Thunderbird 3.0.x series. This would be around
the end of November or start of December. If serious security and/or
stability issues are found after the last security release, the solution
presented to users would be to upgrade to a fixed Thunderbird 3.1.x build.
We are considering that users of the Thunderbird 3.0.x series looking
for support in Mozilla Messaging's Get Satisfication site or in Bugzilla
may be told that their version is unsupported and that they should
upgrade to a supported version after the end of the year. We would
especially welcome feedback from QA and support folks on this point.
From monitoring our current statistics we have less than 10% of our
users on Thunderbird 3.0.x builds, and expect this to be around 5% by
the end of the year. The upgrade to Thunderbird 3.1.x is a relatively
small upgrade, therefore we do not believe that enterprises or the
remaining users will have significant issues with updating.
We therefore think it is not productive to keep maintaining the branch,
especially with one or two more branches expected soon.
Feedback on these proposals is welcome, we are hoping to formally
announce them at the end of this week/start of next week.
Regards
Mark.
Tanstaafl
> From monitoring our current statistics we have less than 10% of our
> users on Thunderbird 3.0.x builds, and expect this to be around 5% by
> the end of the year. The upgrade to Thunderbird 3.1.x is a relatively
> small upgrade, therefore we do not believe that enterprises or the
> remaining users will have significant issues with updating.
One reason that many are holding back on upgrading as I understand it is
the new Quickfilter Toolbar that replaces the old simple searchbox. The
bottom line is, some people, like me, will never really like it. I've
gotten to where I can tolerate it but it required installing an
extension (keyconfig) that most average users aren't willing or able to do.
So, maybe some consideration could be given to my bug 570815 (to provide
an option to use a simple searchbox that can be moved to any toolbar
like the old one, but that incorporates all of the goodness of the new
QF toolbar, but in a small floating panel instead of a massive toolbar?
See the latest interactive mockup generously coded by Thomas D here that
shows a very cool way of providing the same functionality without adding
an entire toolbar to do it:
https://bug570815.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=460747
Anyway, in all honesty, this is really the last major issue I have with
TB3... otherwise, I'm much happier with it than I ever was with TB2.
Dan Mosedale
> On 2010-10-11 6:47 AM, Mark Banner wrote:
>> From monitoring our current statistics we have less than 10% of our
>> users on Thunderbird 3.0.x builds, and expect this to be around 5% by
>> the end of the year. The upgrade to Thunderbird 3.1.x is a relatively
>> small upgrade, therefore we do not believe that enterprises or the
>> remaining users will have significant issues with updating.
> One reason that many are holding back on upgrading as I understand it is
> the new Quickfilter Toolbar that replaces the old simple searchbox.
Do we have any understanding of how many "many" is? Is this something
we're seeing a significant amount of feedback on in support-land?
Dan
Ben Bucksch
> new Quickfilter Toolbar ... be moved to any toolbar
It should not be too hard to make it movable via Customize... Standard
XUL/toolkit stuff (apart from the shrinking, but that's doable, too).
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Tanstaafl
> On 11.10.2010 13:08, Tanstaafl wrote:
>> new Quickfilter Toolbar ... be moved to any toolbar
>
> It should not be too hard to make it movable via Customize... Standard
> XUL/toolkit stuff (apart from the shrinking, but that's doable, too).
Hi Ben...
By 'make it movable' do you mean the entire toolbar, or just the
individual parts (searchbox, buttons, etc)?
I'd be really interested in your opinion of how difficult you think the
proposed standalone searchbox widget would be to implement as depicted
in the interactive demo Thomas D created I linked to before:
https://bug570815.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=460747
That's what really needs to happen - but I guess making the individual
components movable would get us part way there in the interim.
Tanstaafl
> Do we have any understanding of how many "many" is? Is this
> something we're seeing a significant amount of feedback on in
> support-land?
Not so much any more, I guess because people tend to get tired of
complaining and either learn to live with something, or move on.
My comment was based on two things - it is by far the primary reason I
have personally been given whenever I encounter someone who refuses to
upgrade to 3.1 - admittedly not all that large of a sampling, say, 10 or
15 people - and it is the most popular reason I have seen in random
support threads online.
Bottom line is, I think this issue is the primary factor behind those
10% who are still on 3.0, and if v3 of the interactive demo of my bug
570815 was implemented, you'd not only keep those 10% loyal users, you'd
make a whole lot of us others who stuck around and updated in spite of
it extremely happy as well...
Thomas Stache
to check the XUL testcase out. That was news to me, at least.
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_4_for_developers#Remote_XUL_support_removed>
On 11.10.2010 13:08, Tanstaafl wrote:
Dan Mosedale
> On 2010-10-11 6:37 PM, Dan Mosedale wrote:
>> Do we have any understanding of how many "many" is? Is this
>> something we're seeing a significant amount of feedback on in
>> support-land?
> Not so much any more, I guess because people tend to get tired of
> complaining and either learn to live with something, or move on.
>
> My comment was based on two things - it is by far the primary reason I
> have personally been given whenever I encounter someone who refuses to
> upgrade to 3.1 - admittedly not all that large of a sampling, say, 10 or
> 15 people - and it is the most popular reason I have seen in random
> support threads online.
>
> Bottom line is, I think this issue is the primary factor behind those
> 10% who are still on 3.0, and if v3 of the interactive demo of my bug
> 570815 was implemented, you'd not only keep those 10% loyal users, you'd
> make a whole lot of us others who stuck around and updated in spite of
> it extremely happy as well...
I discussed this briefly with a few other folks who spend significant
amounts of time in the support world. There does not seem to be a
shared belief that this is a blocker for such a large group of our users
that we would hold any sort of Tb3 major update for it (indeed, the bar
for that is exceedingly high at this point).
That said, it's still valid feedback, and may yet be worth addressing in
time. Thanks for the suggestion.
Dan
Ben Bucksch
> By 'make it movable' do you mean the entire toolbar, or just the
> individual parts (searchbox, buttons, etc)?
Individual parts. As I said, that's standard toolkit stuff, you just need a
<toolbarpalette>
<toolbarbutton id="quickfilter-starred" label="" />
<toolbaritem>
<textbox id="quicksearchfield" />
</toolbaritem>
</toolbarpalette>
<toolbar id="quickfilter-bar"
defaultset="quickfilter-starred,quicksearchfield" />
That's more or less it - I'm sure almost all XUL hackers here have seen
or done that. Only additional complication is the shrinking and
Thunderbird updates that add/remove buttons, but both of these are
solvable (we solved both with the Firefox toolbar we're creating, the
shrinking idea was actually based on this quickfilter toolbar).
Mark Banner
> Bottom line is, I think this issue is the primary factor behind those
> 10% who are still on 3.0, and if v3 of the interactive demo of my bug
> 570815 was implemented, you'd not only keep those 10% loyal users, you'd
> make a whole lot of us others who stuck around and updated in spite of
> it extremely happy as well...
near those 10% that won't upgrade because of this bug. From the stats we
know that half of that 10% aren't even on the latest security release
for 3.0.x. Added to that we also know that people are generally slow in
upgrading if at all - over the last couple of weeks we've seen migration
of about 1% per week from 3.0.x branch.
That's not to say it isn't something that we should improve (indeed,
Bryan has given it ui-review+), but like Dan says, we don't think this
is a blocker for a large group of people to upgrade.
Given Bryan's ui-review+ I've stuck a couple of flags on the bug so its
more likely to get noticed by folks who are looking for bugs to fix.
Mark.
Tanstaafl
> On 12.10.2010 12:44, Tanstaafl wrote:
>> By 'make it movable' do you mean the entire toolbar, or just the
>> individual parts (searchbox, buttons, etc)?
> Individual parts. As I said, that's standard toolkit stuff, you just need a
> <toolbarpalette>
> <toolbarbutton id="quickfilter-starred" label="" />
> <toolbaritem>
> <textbox id="quicksearchfield" />
> </toolbaritem>
> </toolbarpalette>
> <toolbar id="quickfilter-bar"
> defaultset="quickfilter-starred,quicksearchfield" />
>
> That's more or less it - I'm sure almost all XUL hackers here have seen
> or done that. Only additional complication is the shrinking and
> Thunderbird updates that add/remove buttons, but both of these are
> solvable (we solved both with the Firefox toolbar we're creating, the
> shrinking idea was actually based on this quickfilter toolbar).
Cool, thanks... ok, I'll go open a new bug to do this and make 570815
dependent on it - done:
bug 603915
Maybe one of you guys with knowledge of the code can go add a comment or
two so any developers looking for bugs to work on will have a better
idea of what this would take...?
Anyway, thanks for listening guys...
Tanstaafl
> Just wanted to follow up on this, that it is unlikely to be anywhere
> near those 10% that won't upgrade because of this bug. From the stats we
> know that half of that 10% aren't even on the latest security release
> for 3.0.x. Added to that we also know that people are generally slow in
> upgrading if at all - over the last couple of weeks we've seen migration
> of about 1% per week from 3.0.x branch.
Fair enough, and I certainly didn't say it was all of them - but you
also seem to be forgetting that there is a significant number of people
who have already upgraded who would also love to see this bug
implemented (far more than have commented and/or voted for it in the bug
tracker)...
> That's not to say it isn't something that we should improve (indeed,
> Bryan has given it ui-review+), but like Dan says, we don't think this
> is a blocker for a large group of people to upgrade.
>
> Given Bryan's ui-review+ I've stuck a couple of flags on the bug so its
> more likely to get noticed by folks who are looking for bugs to fix.
Also fair enough... I'll just have to cross my fingers and hope - that
either someone comes along and sees the value (and has the time/skills
to do the work), or that I win the lottery and can afford to hire
someone to do it for me.. ;)