Where Did Mozilla Thunderbird Come From?

Thunderbird was borne of Mozilla blood because it is based on the Mozilla codebase. The project started out with the name Minotaur and was later changed to Thunderbird as the project gained momentum. In the same way that the Firefox team set out to make a lean and nimble web browser by redesigning the browser portion of the Mozilla suite, the Thunderbird developers set out to redesign the Mozilla email component with the intent of making an email client that was both faster and easier to use. They decided to focus primarily on the footprint and the performance of the mail application by removing chrome and components that were being shared with the browser. Thunderbird's user interface (UI) was also reworked to make it easier to navigate. Thunderbird is built on the stable core of Gecko, which is the Mozilla layout engine. Thunderbird's UI is built from the same powerful XUL technology as Firefox. (For more information about XUL, see the FAQ in Chapter 7, "Customizing Firefox with Third-Party Extensions and Themes.")