The way toward Instantbird 1.0

Let’s begin with a clarification about the way we are slowly but surely going to our future 1.0 release. Our initial roadmap contained the somewhat misleading claim that our goal for 1.0 was to reach “feature parity” with Pidgin. This led some people to believe that we were basically copying the Pidgin graphical user interface and reimplementing it in XUL. Although this could have held some truth for the earlier goal of Instantbird - which was to provide the extensibility that is loved in Firefox and features similar to those found in Pidgin - this is no longer the case.

When we implement a new feature in Instantbird, we carefully consider how it is likely to be used. We think about the use cases. We look at how the same problem has been handled by other existing IM clients, so that we can benefit from what others have done before us. Sometimes we take inspiration and implement something in a similar way to another client (for instance the message theme system that we have borrowed from Adium), but sometimes things don’t look satisfying and we have to look for a better solution. We especially try to avoid exposing the user to new popup dialogs that interrupt the user but don’t seem absolutely necessary.

Once something is implemented, we do our best to take advantage of the early feedback we get from our nightly testers.

So why are we doing this? Copying the interface of an existing application as quickly as possible would be easier, and would lead to a fast result. But it would be worthless. We don’t need another Pidgin, Adium, … (insert the name of your favorite multi-protocol IM application here). These applications already exist and are mostly great, there’s no point in cloning them. What we do care about is our users: our current users of course, but also future users. We believe instant messaging should be less frustrating. We want to build an all-in-one instant messaging application that is as easy as possible to use, yet powerful. We value simplicity and ease of use in the default configuration, and at the same time we want to allow advanced customizations. Developers with an idea should be able to easily customize their IM client, like they can already do with their web browser.

We value privacy, and respect your data. Instant messages often have confidential or intimate content. We believe that our users should have the power to decide how this information is used, and where it is stored. This is the reason why even though more and more users decide to use web applications like Gmail, Facebook or Meebo for their IM needs, we believe that it is still relevant in 2010 to build an IM application that runs directly on the computer you own.

We don’t know yet how Instantbird 1.0 will be, it will need to be discussed. With You. At this point we are discussing which improvements will compose the 0.3 release. If you want to take part in this discussion or have questions related to our long term goals, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

What’s next?

We are confident that if you have tried a release from the Instantbird 0.1.* series, you will see Instantbird 0.2 as major improvement. And if you haven’t used Instantbird before, then the 0.2 release is a great time to start! In the next few days, we will detail a few of the features that already make Instantbird 0.2 a very usable instant messaging application, despite its low version number.