Bangalore: It came as a shock to those 20 million people who use Thunderbird as their email client when Mozilla announced its new priorities. According to the disclosure, Mozilla has pulled out the resources from the email client and left its future in the hands of the open source community.

"Much of Mozilla's leadership — including that of the Thunderbird team — has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla's product efforts", Chairperson Mitchell Baker said in a blog post. He added that Thunderbird users are happy with the software and there is no need to innovate it further.

There is no doubt that the community will take over the advancement like it always has and might come up with features that Mozilla couldn’t have developed. But the talk is about why Mozilla need to do this with its second most noteworthy product after Firefox. There is hearsay in the community that Mozilla wants to put better use of its resources in developing a Google Apps-like platform named Kilimanjaro. Some believe that this will be a hard go for Mozilla since it doesn’t have resources like Google. Mozilla is also reported to be concentrating on developing Firefox mobile operating system.

According to the sources, Mozilla still has a dedicated staff for the eight-year old Thunderbird which will bring the email client’s 14, 15, 16 and 17 versions in the next few months and will support the application till mid 2013. After that Mozilla will not enhance Thunderbird but will only take care of its security and stability. This will be done by offering an Extended Support Release and subsequently releasing updates every 6 week.