Any future of Instantbird?

[Kevin Kozuszek]

Hello everyone!

I know that this question has been asked quite often in the past and I
don't want to ask it again. Yesterday I took a look into Bugzilla and I saw
that there's still some kind of development happening around Instantbird.
That's great, but right now more and more problems became part of the
current Instantbird release.

The biggest one is Twitter. To be honest Instantbird is still by far the
best messenger when it comes to handling the single mainstream right next
to a normal chat window. Other messengers like Trillian or Miranda NG
aren't able to do that. But it became pure luck if you can use Twitter in
Instantbird 1.5 or not. You can register a first account if you use a
workaround with the "latest" nightly for Windows. If you try this a second
time, the second account won't even appear in your contact list.

That's not all. It's no secret that Instantbird 1.5 is a massive security
risk in 2017 as it is still based on Gecko 25 and libpurple 2.10.7. In
addition to that the certificate which you were using for the update
servers doesn't seem to be valid anymore. I got that notification as I
tried to look for updates yesterday.

I don't want to bash or hate anybody and I really appreciated your work
you've done so far in the past. Instantbird became my favourite messenger a
few years ago with Version 1.2. But right now it's just some kind of
zombie. You aren't present on your blog, on Instantbird's account on
Twitter or on the other public channels. Most people just won't look into
Bugzilla to see if anything happens.

In conclusion, I would love to see a blogpost in the near future where you
share some of your upcoming plans with us. It's important because the
current situation isn't acceptable for anybody anymore, and it is also
important because Mozilla, as we all know, is going to make significant
changes to the Gecko platform and this will probably affect Instantbird,
too. We don't need Instantbird 1.6 that soon and I can understand that
fixing the build system is quite hard. But it would be great if there'll be
an Instantbird 1.5.1 release just to make the protocolls (especially
Twitter) work again and to fix some of the security risks that came up in
the last three years.

Yours,
Kevin