Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client is better than ever right now, as the long-awaited Thunderbird 115 update with the ‘Supernova’ interface overhaul was just released earlier in July. There are more updates on the horizon, though, including one that will mark the return of Mozilla’s online file sharing service.
The latest episode of ThunderCast, the podcast created by the Thunderbird team, revealed that “Firefox Send is being reborn within the Thunderbird family.” There were no further details provided — the plans are likely in the earliest stages of development. The team also said it was looking into a meeting scheduling tool, and potentially other integrations with existing services.
Firefox Send was a free file sharing web app, which allowed people to upload files up to 1GB in size, and then share the files with others using the provided link. Files were automatically deleted after a certain period of time, and the files could be encrypted with a password for improved privacy. It was a great way to quickly share files without using cloud storage services, where data usually can’t be encrypted or automatically deleted afterwards. It was first available in August 2017, but its encrypted functionality made it popular for sending malware payloads, and Mozilla took the service offline temporarily in July 2020 to investigate the problem.
Unfortunately, Firefox Send never returned, as it was shut down in September 2020 along with Firefox Notes. Mozilla laid off more than 250 employees around the same time, which (according to ZDNet) limited the company’s ability to investigate malware problems with Firefox Send and develop countermeasures. However, the service was open-source, so forks like send.vis.ee remain online. There are also clients for uploading files to Firefox Send, which now work with third-party forks, such as the command-line ffsend tool.
Mozilla reviving Firefox Send for use in Thunderbird makes sense. When you add a large file to a message in Gmail, it’s uploaded to Google Drive instead of sending as an attachment, and Thunderbird could have similar functionality with something like Firefox Send. However, the Thunderbird team would have to do the work that Mozilla couldn’t do in 2020.
Source: ThunderCast