alt Hacker NewsMozilla Thunderbolt
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The Get Started button links to a contact form. That's unexpected. I looked for the source code repository and thanks to somebody here that hinted at it as a Thunderbird project, I found [1]. That's a better Get Started page.
What's with the odd name? Apple already has a 15 year-old product called Thunderbolt. Mozilla already has a similarly-named but totally-different product called Thunderbird.
For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
So this is only for organizations and not for individuals? The Get Started button goes to a form where it wants to know how they can help your organization. I didn’t see any other link to the source code or documentation. If whoever created this site sees this comment, please clear up the above questions and observations.
I immediately thought "oh, the email client? It's AI now?" Then I realized this is Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird. Kind of an odd choice by Mozilla to have two products with such similar names.
From the home page I have no idea what is this, what even is AI client? OpenCode competitor?
Also Thunderbolt is too similar to Thunderbird, really got me puzzled for a sec.
The name is strange. They had a fox and a bird, used fire and thunder. The logical next would be Earthworm or watervole.
oh mozilla, why don't you just focus on Firefox. That is all we want.
Good thing they didn't name this Unity or Proton. We are seriously running out of names for applications and services, ar we?
Wow this is a confusing name.
At a glance it looks identical to Mozilla Thunderbird, but has nothing in common.
And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
I know it's hard to come up with names and pretty much everything is used by something else, but this seems particularly bad.
I swear there are like 10 different Thunderbolts. Why reuse such a common name?
I thought Mozilla was going to join the Thunderbolt standard and/or making some tool for it until I clicked the link haha. Very interesting name choice
Do trademarks not matter anymore? The name and logo are lawsuits just waiting to happen.
Curious name choice, that's clearly encumbered by other trademarks.
Also, my impression is: yay another AI front-end. What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla Thunderbolt?
Why not "Phyrefox"?
They are so incompetent, they could not even come up with a name sufficiently different from their own product.
I'm gonna deploy it on my machine and try it! Better option than using ChatGPT or Claude.
Some confusion I see here is lots of people seem to not know that MZLA who makes Thunderbird and Mozilla Corporation who make firefox are separate entities in the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. This Thunderbolt is a MZLA product... so ya
This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
Chrome on Linux is ~1.47 times faster than Firefox on the Jetstream 3 benchmark as recently reported by Phoronix[0]. That's how we want you to spend the money Mozilla, keeping up with your well-funded rival Google, and making it so we don't end up with a browser monoculture. These sorts of distractions just piss me off, and are not part of your core mission.
Some feedback: It would be useful to explain what you do differently on your website.
Curious how this compares to open-webui on the web, for example.
120k LoC of probably largely vibecoded nonsense for a window with a text box and a button that lets you send and receive some data over a HTTP API.
Their Thunderbird for iOS repo is 34k lines.
I'm so very tired.
All I see is effort that could have been spent improving the rest of Mozilla's products.
If this wouldn't be under Mozilla/Thunderbird Org on Github, I would have considered this to be fake. It looks very unsubstantial ...
There's an architecture diagram here: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/ar...
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
Lots of negative posts here, who presume to speak for others. I, for one, welcome new entrants especially since they're under the Mozilla umbrella. This client could use the passwords and cookies stored in Firefox. And I'd trust it too, unlike other clients.
Thought "hey this better not be AI". Yes it's AI.
Just keep making a decent browser and stop getting distracted on shit.
Is it just me or is this really bad copy? The only clue as to what this is on the landing page is the background of the product image. And I also have to sign up to find out anything else about it.
No thanks.
I tried to run it on my machine, and the release artifacts are missing entirely. Not going to spend time building from source.
Turns out chat apps are pretty easy to build I guess.
Thank god for the Ladybird project
It's weird that they would name it like thunderbird
No way they really named it thunderbolt. I mean. Seriously? What is next Mozilla USB-C vibeslop?
Aw, another AI thing. I was hoping this was their email service.
What even is this? A chat frontend to arbitrary model providers on the backend - I guess that's sort of useful not to have to build yourself but it doesn't feel like the amazing thing they're trying to hype. Some of the features seem a bit weird to me too - like end-to-end encryption? There isn't a server intermediary, so you already have that with TLS to the model provider.
Yikes.
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.
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If I may, Mozilla, you shouldn't release half-ass products that looks vibe coded like this, even the website looks like it took 30min to do with Claude
Did I seriously click on a Mozilla product and see AI? You guys at Mozilla read the Internet right?
Doesn’t this have to be done under another name to prevent massive company-killing pushback?
Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.