Mozilla Sunbird

~ the obituary ~

sunbird was the mozilla app i installed because i already trusted the logo, then never opened twice. in the firefox era i ran most of what mozilla put out, the browser first and then whatever came next, and sunbird was the calendar in that family. it worked. it just never earned a place in a day that did not really have a calendar in it yet.

mozilla announced it in july 2003 and put out the first real release in 2005. the pitch made sense on paper, a free cross-platform calendar built the way firefox was built, open and the same on windows or linux. sun microsystems helped, volunteers filled in the rest. for a while it looked like the browser trick might work twice.

it did not. the browser had a clear enemy in internet explorer and a clear reason to switch. a standalone calendar had neither. most people who wanted one already got it from outlook at work or, a bit later, from google's calendar in a tab. sunbird was solving a problem the web was quietly taking off the table.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

technically sunbird was the same calendar engine as lightning, the extension that lived inside thunderbird, just packaged as its own window. it read and wrote the standard ical format and could subscribe to remote calendars. by the later versions it even talked to google calendar. none of that was the problem. the problem was that a calendar wants to sit next to your mail, not stand alone in its own program, and mozilla eventually admitted as much.

~ the inheritance ~

on march 30, 2010 mozilla released sunbird 1.0 beta 1 and, in the same breath, stopped working on it. the effort went entirely into lightning, the version bolted into thunderbird, which is where mozilla's calendar still lives. sunbird did not really die so much as get absorbed. the standalone window closed and the engine kept running inside the mail client, which was mozilla's whole point about where a calendar belongs.

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