Already half a blog has echoed the announcement made by Mozilla on what will be the future of your email client, and it is not for less, when the changes that are coming may not be so successful on the part of the Foundation.
The subject is very simple, Thunderbird is less important than the next flagship product of Mozilla: Firefox OS. They consider that Thunderbird It is a stable, finished product that would only need security updates, relying on "Community" for the rest of the possible innovations that could be added in future versions. According to the official note:
…. There are currently two editions of Thunderbird: "Thunderbird '" and "Thunderbird ESR". Only "Thunderbird" will be affected by the change:
A new version of Thunderbird ESR will be available on November 20, 2012. As defined in the Thunderbird ESR plan (http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/organizations/faq/), it will inherit the feature set current in Thunderbird. This version will be updated every six weeks, for the duration of the ESR cycle to ensure the best possible security and stability for organizations….
.... Mozilla will continue to provide paid staff, logistics and infrastructure to the release team to produce updates and new versions with the same level of quality today. Support will continue to be provided by the Thunderbird community and Mozilla will continue to provide the necessary infrastructure.
If you ask me, I wouldn't know what to say. I think that Mozilla is risking his future by putting it in the hands of Firefox OS, which at this minute, we will not know if it will give the expected result when there is already strong competition in the mobile market between Android, iOS and others that are left on the road. The point is, it seems to me that Thunderbird not as polished as they say.
It is a software that needs constant attention. They could, for example, give the interface a facelift, to give it an attractive touch like the one it has Opera Mail, for example. But nothing, we'll see what happens. We will see if Mozilla He is not mistaken, and even if he is, we can always count on other alternatives (although less powerful) to manage our mail.