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.

It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?

If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...

but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.

We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.

They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.

Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.

I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.

> 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

Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.

It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.

  > 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.

https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt

Can the team please use that money on making thunderbird look like the nice UI mockups that were published that don't look anything like thunderbird.

I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.

> This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there

I would rather have them work on Thunderbird.

Thunderbird was literally asking for donations just a few days ago?

It goes to show that Mozilla(s) could, if they really wanted, restructure Mozilla Corporation / Foundation.

(edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)

>Thunderbird is revenue positive

Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?

I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?

Just for clarity, you do mean Thunderbird (the email client), not Thunderbolt (this new AI client)?

i find it interesting that they advertise it as "trusted because european"

What does “revenue positive” even mean?

It doesn’t mean profitable, it doesn’t mean cash flow positive.

Are you just trying to say their revenue is greater than zero?

Hu... Revenue positive just last week that had a pretty dire sounding call for donations ala make sure thunderbird can survive...

> Thunderbird is revenue positive

Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?