昨天，Mozilla對外揭露了一款名為Raindrop的新產品。
根據Raindrop官網上的說明，這款新產品的研發團隊就是ThunderbirdMozilla的開源碼郵件軟體的原班人馬。
Raindrop官網將這款新產品定調為「Open Messaging for the Open Web」，並且把它描述成一款可以同時提供電子郵件、Twitter推訊、Youtube影音播放等功能的新產品。
Today we’re introducing Raindrop, an exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences.
We hope to lead and spur the development of extensible applications that help users easily and enjoyably manage their conversations, notifications, and messages across a variety of online services. A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal — we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we process messages, and in how we can help give people control over their personal data and experiences.
When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies.
看到這樣的陳述，許多人很容易聯想到Google Wave，並且將Raindrop視為Firefox準備用來反擊Google的新兵器。
類似這種正面對決的觀點，譬如以下幾篇文章：
不過，撇開Raindrop與Wave兩者目前皆處於實驗研發階段的不確定性，以及未來導入使用市場的多樣可能發展不談，比較務實而客觀的推論，應該是像《Meet Mozilla's Raindrop: Like Google Wave, but different enough to co-exist》這篇文章所說的：兩者雖然相近，但差異顯然大到足以並存。
延伸閱讀：