Instantbird

» see instantbird.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Instantbird shipped in october 2007, which in Turkey was the middle of the MSN decade. A client that unified twenty chat protocols under one window solved a problem I did not have, because everyone I would have wanted to talk to was on the same network already. The multi-protocol client was a category I knew existed without ever needing one.

It was written by Florian Quèze and built on XULRunner, the same Mozilla runtime that Firefox sat on. The protocol work came from libpurple, the library underneath Pidgin, which meant Instantbird could speak OSCAR for AIM and ICQ, XMPP, IRC, YMSG and a long tail of regional services on day one without implementing any of them.

What made it more than a Pidgin skin was the second layer. The team wrote their own JavaScript implementations for IRC, XMPP including Google Talk, Twitter, YMSG and Odnoklassniki, which was slower than the C code sitting right next to it and was done anyway. There was a reason for that, and it turned out to be the reason the project existed at all.

By version 1.5 in december 2013 it had over 250 add-ons, message themes down to a Bubbles style that showed the gap between messages, conversation logging on by default and translations into thirteen languages. That was also the last release. The client had four more years of official life and shipped nothing in any of them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the client that was really a lab ~

Thunderbird wanted chat. Thunderbird could not have libpurple, because the license did not fit alongside Mozilla's, and rewriting twenty protocol implementations from scratch inside a mail client was not a project anybody was going to fund. Instantbird already had a chat backend that was being rewritten in JavaScript, protocol by protocol, for exactly this reason.

So the work went the other way around. Instantbird 1.2 in august 2012 shipped with its chat backend shared with Thunderbird, and roughly a third of the Instantbird codebase was already sitting in Thunderbird's nightly builds. Thunderbird 15 arrived weeks later with instant messaging in it. The small client had spent five years growing the component that the big one needed.

~ ten years to the day ~

On 18 october 2017 Quèze posted under the title "Thunderbird is the next version of Instantbird" and wrote that development was stopping on Instantbird as a standalone product. The date was not a coincidence. Version 0.1 had gone out on 18 october 2007.

It is a strange kind of shutdown notice. Nothing failed, no company folded, no acquirer switched off a server. The announcement is closer to a merge commit written in prose: the code is fine, it lives somewhere else now, and the place it lives has more users than the client ever did.

~ where the code went to live ~

Thunderbird still has a chat tab. The IRC and XMPP support in it came out of a small French developer's side project that never had a business model and never needed one. That is a better outcome than most of the graves on this site get, and it is still a grave, because instantbird.com does not resolve and version 1.5 is the last build anyone can download.

The comparison worth making is with Digsby, which was doing the same job in the same years with money behind it and got caught in 2009 selling its users' idle processor time through the installer. Instantbird had no revenue to protect and no investors to satisfy, so when it stopped being necessary it said so plainly and pointed at where the code had gone.

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