With the recent news that Mozilla will no longer be innovating with new versions of Thunderbird, many Ubuntu users might be left wondering what this will mean for their favorite distribution’s default suite of software. In fact, it seems like Canonical has had it’s hands full over the last two years trying to find a winning combination. Canonical has thrown it’s hands up in the air before and changed default software on a whim, most famously switching from enterprise friendly Evolution to user-friendly and mainstream Thunderbird. Also, it chose to abandon the stellar Banshee player in favor of the more homely and less feature-rich Rhythmbox.
This of course is not a terrible trend. Canonical has been trying to differentiate itself for years and is just now finding it’s style-stride with Unity. As releases come and go, you can expect that Unity will continue to distance itself from it’s birth-mother, Gnome, and move in an independent ???literally less dependent – direction, as it continues to fork the projects it is built on. Ubuntu’s recent decision to fork the Gnome Control Center is pure evidence of this. Thunderbird should be part of that cord-cutting process too.