Mozilla Messaging

Mozilla is taking on email now in a serious way. That’s good news. I agree with them, email hasn’t come very far since its inception, and people use it way more than any other single internet activity. Obviously any discussion about new email systems has to include gmail, which I use and is great, but really, in a long time that has been the only email game changer. And while I love searching emails using to: operators and threaded conversations, I don’t see that as genius ideas as much as everyone before google being lazy.

But what can Mozilla do better? The problem is, email is an application. Mozilla, and in my opinion, large open-source projects in general, don’t do applications well. They do platforms well. Platforms for other smaller groups (whether open source or not) to create on. Can Mozilla Messaging ever outpace gmail in terms of functionality? Can it outpace the next web-based email startup? Email, like social networking, and photo sharing, and everything else is an application that has moved to the web. Firefox is a great platform for these applications. Creating a client side email system is somewhat backwards, in the same way that open office is backwards. Yes it might be used by the occasional small business that doesn’t want to use office or outlook, meanwhile orders of magnitude more people not interested in emulating old closed source solutions in free software are using web based solutions like private wikis, google docs, etc.

I’d love to be proven wrong, and have them think of something great, but I’m not counting on it. And even if something amazing does come up, I can’t imagine it couldn’t be included in the next iteration of web-based solutions almost immediately.