Mozilla all but pulls the plug on Thunderbird

Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker, has announced that the organisation will be suspending all non-essential development of their popular email client Thunderbird, to focus on "driving innovation through other offerings".

Thunderbird is a free, open-source, email and news client available for Windows, Mac and Linux, developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The first stable version of Thunderbird was released on December 7, 2004, and received over 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release. The last release was Thunderbird 13.0.1 on 15 June 2012.

In a blog post that'll be seen as a critique of the Thunderbird development team, Baker said "We've tried for years to build Thunderbird as a highly innovative offering, where it plays a role in moving modern Internet messaging to a more open, innovative space, and where there is a growing, more active contributor base. To date, we haven't achieved this."

Clarifying that the decision wasn't his alone, Baker continued, "Much of Mozilla's leadership -- including that of the Thunderbird team -- has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla's product efforts."

"As a result, the Thunderbird team has developed a plan that provides both stability for Thunderbird's current state and allows the Thunderbird community to innovate if it chooses."

Baker clarified that Mozilla will continue to provide security maintenance updates for existing users.