On Sun, 7/12/2026 12:18 AM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
Whenever Thunderbird meets Firefox or vice versa,
will they automatically copy their data to each
other (that is, data sync)? :)
No.
You can ask the LLM-AI questions like this, and it will
tell you how the software works, as the software is open
source, and the LLM-AI can actually read the source files.
Firefox ----+ \
Firefox --+ \___ The parent process, talks to its children [Quantum]
Firefox -+ /
<=== This air gap exists between the two process sets
Notice there are no plus signs here, no path.
Thunderbird ----+ \___ The parent process, talks to its children [SuperNova]
Thunderbird -+ /
When Thunderbird is asked to open a URL in a Firefox window, it does it like this.
Firefox may not even be running at the time, and if it is not running, then
it starts up (Process Create does this). For security reasons, the functions the programs carry out are limited, as part of controlling the attack surface. They don't arbitrarily lash a bunch of shit together in a careless manner. When Thunderbird does this, it can even call the Default Browser, which may not even be Firefox.
It could end up calling up MSEdge this way, if MSEdge happens to be the users choice of Default Browser. So while I draw it like this, other From-To pairs can exist.
Thunderbird --\
\
OS (Process Create with a passed URL as a command line parameter)
/
(Firefox) <---/ [this could be any web browser on the system...]
The designers look for common features on the OSes, before defining mechanisms for communications. The staff at Mozilla don't like writing custom spooky code for each OS, but things like the graphics stack are an example of an exception. Graphics, and I would suppose Printing, could involve extra effort to support three or more OSes.
Paul
--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)