Mozilla may separate from Thunderbird, its stand-alone e-mail client, the company"s CEO has disclosed. In a posting to her blog Wednesday, CEO Mitchell Baker said that Mozilla"s first priority is, and will continue to be, its open-source browser, Firefox. "As a result, Mozilla doesn"t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don"t expect this to change in the foreseeable future," said Baker.
Thunderbird"s community, which includes a large number of unpaid programmers, should be cut loose "to determine its own destiny," she said. The e-mail app, which was just updated to version 2.0.0.5 last week, is Mozilla"s answer to Microsoft Outlook and Entourage, and other stand-alone e-mailers such as Mail, which is bundled with Mac OS X. Like Firefox, it"s free to download, and comes in editions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.