OpenPGP and usability

[Patrick Brunschwig]

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Werner Koch wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:43, alex at bofh.net.pl said:
> 
>> At least Thunderbird openly invites plugins and Enigmail is a good one.
> 
> Let Patrick explain you why there are still problems.

The user interface may be nice indeed, and the whole extension seems to
be quite well-integrated into Thunderbird, but in the background I can
tell you there are many hacks and workarounds needed to get things
running. Still, after more than 6 years of development, there are parts
of the code in Enigmail that I would call fragile

> Have you ever tried to work with the Mozilla Foundation on allowing
> better integration of certain plugins?  For example supporting non-NSS
> based crypto?

The main problem is that Thunderbird is very open for add-ons related to
the user interface, but once you dig into the core of the application,
it's no longer so well extensible. This is especially true for some of
the existing core parts. Some bits date back to Netscape 4.0 (or even
earlier) and have not been redesigned ever since then -- you can imagine
 what follows now.

- -Patrick
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