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Our Fastest, Most Beautiful Release Ever: Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” Is Here!

74 responses

On behalf of the Thunderbird team, Thunderbird Council, our global community of contributors, and our extended Mozilla family, I am incredibly excited to announce the initial launch of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” for Linux, macOS, and Windows! With this year’s version, we’re delivering much more than just another yearly release. Supernova represents a modernized overhaul of the software – both visually and technically – while retaining the familiarity and flexibility you expect from Thunderbird.

“Supernova is the beginning of a new era for Thunderbird,” says Ryan Sipes, Thunderbird’s Product and Business Development Manager. “It lays a beautiful, solid groundwork for future releases that will make Thunderbird a significantly better email client – and we won’t stop until it’s the best option out there.”

“During the past year we reworked some of the oldest parts of our code base with the goal of modernizing them to make maintenance and extensibility easier,” says Alex Castellani, Thunderbird’s Director of Product Engineering. “We did our best to strike a comfortable balance between new features and interface changes to appeal to new users, while maintaining the current layout and interface that millions of our users know and love. This is the first step towards a more flexible, reliable, and customizable Thunderbird that will accommodate different needs, preferences, and workflows.”

Here’s a brief look at some of the best new features and improvements in Thunderbird 115. For the complete list, please visit this support article.

Modernized Cards View

(Mockup, subject to change)

Supernova’s new Card View is our version of the well-known vertical layout for the Message List, perfect for people used to modern webmail. Card View emulates a mobile interface list with multi-line support, offering a more comfortable appearance to reduce cognitive burden. (And because we want Supernova to feel familiar for veteran users, the legacy “Table” view is still available.)

Brand New Thunderbird Logo

Supernova ships with a brand new Thunderbird logo honoring our history and vital connection to Mozilla, while representing the revitalization of our brand and a promising, sustainable future.

New Thunderbird AppMenu ≡

Dynamic Unified Toolbar

Supernova features a single dynamic toolbar, presenting frequently used and contextual options based on the tab or Space that is currently active. Take full control by customizing the toolbar and window layout to perfectly fit your workflow.

Intuitive AppMenu

The new Application Menu (≡) in Supernova is now keyboard-accessible, and redesigned for faster, easier navigation. Fewer submenus, persistent global options, and consistent iconography combine to create a much more intuitive experience.

Improved Calendar Design

(Mockup, subject to change)

As part of an ongoing effort to modernize and upgrade Thunderbird’s Calendar, Supernova introduces an improved “mini-month” layout, improvements to the day/week/month grid, a pleasing color palette, and several more minor changes.

Elegant Density Control

Change your density setting and font size easily from the new AppMenu

Working with multiple monitors and display resolutions? Supernova lets you dial in the perfect density settings and font sizes for the entire application, with just a single click from the AppMenu.

New + Sortable Folder Modes

Supernova gives you more control by introducing sortable Folder Modes. Display all of your Tags in the Folder Pane, turn on and off Local Folders, or move your favorite Folder Mode sections up and down with one click. Less scrolling, more productivity.

Eye-Catching Tags View

Tags are a familiar and powerful part of your workflow, so Supernova adds an eye-catching “Tags” view to the Folder Pane. Quickly jump to your custom, color-coded tag categories to find and filter your messages even faster.

Improved Address Book

Supernova continues to iterate on the modernized Address Book introduced in Thunderbird 102. You’ll enjoy a new tabular view, an improved Edit view, delete buttons, and better accessibility.

Better Accessibility

Speaking of accessibility, Supernova substantially improves Thunderbird’s keyboard navigation and screen reader accessibility across the entire application. We’ve also greatly expanded the ability to navigate Mail content and buttons using the TAB and arrow keys.

More To Come…

Supernova is constantly evolving. Throughout the next year, we’ll deliver many improvements to existing Supernova features and introduce brand new ones, including Thunderbird Sync. Upgrade to version 115 and experience the future of Thunderbird!

How To Get Thunderbird 115 “Supernova”

As with any major release, we sometimes become aware of corner cases after significant public testing. The Thunderbird team will wait to enable automatic updates until we’re confident no such issues exist. We’ll keep you posted right here, and on social media platforms. (Existing Thunderbird 102 users will continue to see security updates during this time). 

On Linux, the timing of this release and subsequent automatic updates may be determined by your distribution’s maintainers. If it’s convenient for you, we recommend installing the Thunderbird Flatpak from Flathub, which is now packaged and maintained by the Thunderbird team. (Please note that 115 is not live on Flathub at time of publication, but as always we’ll keep you updated.)

If you don’t want to wait for an automatic update, Thunderbird 115 is also available to download directly at thunderbird.net for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Want to visualize the differences between 102 and 115 at a glance? Check out this awesome comparison slider.)

Tags: 2023-recap Supernova Thunderbird Thunderbird 115

74 responses

Quentin wrote on

Bravooooo !!!
Thanks for all this great work 🙂 it’s going to be awesome in few versions thanks to this huge technical work !

Gianluca Gabrielli wrote on

First of all, thank you for the astonishing work you are doing. I’m a longtime TB user and since few years I install it via Flathub. I’m exited to read that now the upstream is managing TB in Flathub, like Mozilla does for Firefox.

My questions are, how does it works and how can I validate it? Will you build the flatpak package internally then push it to the Flathub repository (like Mozilla does), or will you take ownership of the TB-flatpak git repository [0] and keep pushing public commits to it?

I see that there is an open PR [1] to update TB in Flatpak issued by EliasOfWaffle, is him a member of the TB upstream?

[0] https://github.com/flathub/org.mozilla.Thunderbird
[1] https://github.com/flathub/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/pull/306

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Hi and thanks for using Thunderbird! We will be building the package ourselves and pushing directly to Flathub. The build we use to make the Flatpak is simply a repackaging of the non-flatpak Thunderbird build binaries. I hope this answers your question.

Mirko wrote on

Can’t wait to try it! <3

Persian Guy wrote on

It’s super awesome, thank you folks.

Matthieu Dubuget wrote on

Would be nice if the essential nostalgy plug-in would be integrated…
In the meantime, I won’t test until it will be ported to the new thunderbird version.

WildByDesign wrote on

Excellent release. Thank you for everything.

I just wanted to point out one small issue with the new icon. In Windows 11 (likely other versions as well), the Thunderbird icon on the taskbar is about 50% of the size of all other taskbar icons, including Firefox.

I checked the icon resources in the binaries and it appears that the issue is that the icons have about double the amount of empty pixels surrounding the Thunderbird logo in comparison to Firefox icon and all other icons as well.

Cheers!

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Thanks for pointing this out! We’re already working on a fix and hope to have this resolved and shipped ASAP.

basteyy wrote on

Based on the screens, I’m looking forward to testing it. Thanks to all the developers for their work. I hope that the community will be satisfied with the new design. Perhaps I find enough reasons to change back from eM Client and Outlook.

Terry wrote on

Can I down load today and will all my data be transferred?

Jason Evangelho wrote on

The path of least resistance is to simply wait for your client to auto-update. Auto-updates will begin rolling out as soon as we’re confident there are no game-breaking bugs that slipped through.

Terry Youens wrote on

Can I install the new version today?

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Sure, you can install it manually today! If you’re using Windows or macOS, you can download 115 and install it “over” version 102. This will act as an upgrade.

Glandos wrote on

Hi!
Thanks for the very nice improvements, this is awesome!

Just a small remark: is it possible to distribute something *else* than BZip2 archive for Linux? According to my small tests, it’s bigger than 20% from either XZ (-9) or ZSTD (-19), and zstd uncompress 15 times faster than bzip2.
I know backward compatibility is important, but at least XZ is 2 times faster than bzip2, and it’s available nearly everywhere since a long time ago

Jason Evangelho wrote on

For Linux, we’re going to encourage people to use our Flatpak packages moving forward.

D A Wilson wrote on

Where the heck is that “cool comparison slider”?

Fraetor wrote on

Looking pretty slick. I’m looking forward to trying it out when the Flatpak updates.

PerceptivX wrote on

Awesome release, love 🙂

Miguel wrote on

waiting for the flatpak

DAve Shillito wrote on

Looks interesting, and I agree Thunderbird needed a refresh.

But I hope it can be made to look as much like the current version as possible, I have elderly parents to support who complain when things change. I switched them to Thunderbird a year ago when I could no longer install their ancient copy of Outlook 2002 on their new PC and I still have complaints about how they hate Thunderbird because everything is different. If it changes again I will never hear the end of it. 🙁

I’m reasonably looking forward to it for my own use, but also hope that it is customisable enough so we can turn off annoying features like the unified inbox.

Jason Evangelho wrote on

You’ll be relieved to know that 115 still mostly defaults to the layout and presentation you’re used to from version 102. It takes a few toggles and changes to get the “Supernova” look. And we did this because we understand some of our users have been used to that general paradigm for the last 20 years.

We also have no plans to retire the “legacy” views, although the defaults *may* change in the future.

Vic wrote on

Can you tell us more about “Thunderbird Sync”? I’m curious if it has anything to do with Exchange Active Sync.

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Thunderbird Sync will function in a similar way to Firefox Sync. We’ll use it sync your account credentials, filters, tags, major preferences, and more across multiple Thunderbird installations (or to a new Thunderbird installation from your saved Sync info).

Marek wrote on

Dear Jason, when can we expect the flathub update? There is still the v.102.13.0.
Thank you very much!

Jason Evangelho wrote on

We’re hoping it’s ready this week. Going as fast as we possibly can to get this ready for you!

Dom Bommarito wrote on

Excellent revision of TB!!! I would love to see a Hybrid View of both Cards View and Table View in the Message Pane, that would add a 3rd line to each message, showing Tags and other information which is selected in the Table View, I use Tags and other info extensively, and this would be a big help.

Brian B wrote on

Please tell me “legacy” Table View will endure forever. There are those of us that don’t care for vertical mode.

Is there a proper procedure if we want to try Supernova and go back? Or does the preference get update like with regular updates and you become version locked?

Jason Evangelho wrote on

We currently have to plans to sunset the Table view.

As for trying Supernova without interfering with your 102 installation — assuming you’re on Windows, simply install it to a non-default directory. (Change the default option that the Thunderbird installer suggests.) This will leave 102 intact.

Adam wrote on

Will this version be able to use something like “userchrome.css” to change the color of the “unread” messages vs the “read” messages in the list?

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Hi Adam, userchrome.css is present, but we do not offer any official support or troubleshooting for it. Please tweak it at your own risk.

essa wrote on

Thanks !!! this is beautiful

user wrote on

Thanks a lot!

Anonymous Gerbil wrote on

Especially applaud the effort it must have taken to be able to customize it as close to the old look as possible.

Which, unfortunately, is all wasted by forcing the unified toolbar above the menu bar, where below the tabs would have been the more natural position. Seems that some ui designers have missed that csd’s are, to put it mildly, not appreciated by all.

Eli Linares wrote on

Congratulations to the devs. I’m absolutely thrilled by this new release, It’s so much better than the previous versions. It actually looks like modern software now. But for the love of God, please fix that icon, it looks horrendous in Windows 11 and Windows 10! I can’t even tell what it is about, that’s how messy and weird it looks.

Furthermore, I believe the reason it looks like that is because it’s just way too small. It looks totally out of place in Windows 11. It’s smaller than all other icons on my taskbar.

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Thanks Eli! We’re aware of this issue on Windows and already have a fix in the works.

Dimas wrote on

How can I add the global search input in the unified toolbar? I can’t see it in the customize screen.

john wrote on

Would it be possible to add vjournal to the calendar? I believe it’s a tiny adjustment to the vevents or vtodo.

FabulousCupcake wrote on

The table view being called legacy view makes it sound like there is already plan to deprecate and remove it already.

Please don’t do that — I would stop using Thunderbird if it’s removed

Jason Evangelho wrote on

We appreciate your feedback on this. Sometimes word choices are challenging! Calling it “legacy” is simply a way to imply that it’s the more traditional view inherited from past versions. It wasn’t called this as a way to signal that we plan to remove the Table view.

Name wrote on

This is horrible: why are you wasting space at the top for that annoying search bar?

Why create problems for issues solved in the previous release version?

Search should go back where it was…

Erik wrote on

Am i understanding it correctly this is a wrapped browserpage, like microsofts new outlook mail-“app”?

Jason Evangelho wrote on

No, I’m not sure where you got that impression.

honx wrote on

again change for the sake of change. i hate change.

is there a way to prevent thunderbird from updating and block updating? i prefer to stay on version 102.13.0, to keep the look, feel and settings i’m used to.
and i want to keep my userchrome.css i had to create back in 2020 to undo some of these “changes” which were introduced in version 91… i don’t want to go through all this ordeal again, so screw “security updates” and whatever else…
so i just want to stay put on version 102.13.0 of thunderbird. how can i achieve this?

Jason Evangelho wrote on

It’s not change for the sake of change: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbird-why-were-rebuilding-from-the-ground-up/

Regarding staying frozen on Thunderbird 102, go into Settings, and under “General” scroll down to Updates. There, under “Allow Thunderbird To” select the radio button for “Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them.” Then uncheck the background service checkbox.

You can also implement a policy to avoid the nagging: https://github.com/thundernest/policy-templates/tree/master/templates/central#appautoupdate

By the way, you started posting your messages here when my workday was almost finished. Woke up this morning to a tsunami of rude messages and accusations from you about censorship. I am the only person managing this blog’s comments, content, all of our social media, and more. Please exercise patience and politeness in the future.

Rik Shaw wrote on

Thanks so much for this post and congrats to the whole team on a great effort moving things forward. For the Linux Flatpak version will aarch64/arm64 architecture also be added?

David Fleetwood wrote on

Suggestion: One thing Office does well is keep a classic and modern toggle, with the latter defaulting to the current preferred (and developed) UI. Might make it easy to permit people to get a one click legacy look if that’s what they prefer while freeing you up to change the default to whatever you are working towards.

Just a thought since some people here are very concerned about getting back to what they know, and you are apparently defaulting to legacy which is not a great first impression for switchers.

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Thanks David, it’s a great suggestion. We are looking at the potential for some kind of “upgrade assistant” in the future to let people interactively switch between new and classic visual paradigms.

nin wrote on

When will TB be available on iphone 🙂

Jason Evangelho wrote on

We’ll start developing late this year, and hopefully have more to share in 2024.

Andrew SHatton wrote on

Have changed my donation amount and bank who pay – I need to confirm details am disabled and need a conventional email address to write to – I am in the UK

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Hi Andrew and thanks for your support! Please feel free to contact donate_reply@thunderbird.net for any questions about your donations.

Adam wrote on

Thanks for the improvements, but I’ll stick with the old version for the sake of the message view. It’s better to sort messages by date and correspondents as they are in separate windows. No need to look at the headlines of the news. And I have a lot of messages from other accounts, so there is a lot to sort and delete. I have the same problem in Outlook, so I prefer Thunderbird. Give the ability to display the old message view, maybe I will switch to the newer one.

Jason Evangelho wrote on

The “Table” view you’re familiar with ships in 115. In fact, it’s still the default.

GreenMarty wrote on

I quite like new design.
Only part that sucked for me was that it is not available in official repo on my Linux Mint.

However there’s simple python that automates installation of TB 115 from official sorces according to the official guide. I used it on Linux Mint.

https://github.com/fromSmolsoft/tb_install

If anyone needs it.

It’s free and open source so i hope i’m helping TB not breaking rules to post the link.

Jason Evangelho wrote on

No problem with sharing some knowledge and FOSS tools with the community. We’ll just say this: As with any major release, we sometimes become aware of corner cases only after significant public testing. So, the Thunderbird team will wait to enable automatic updates until we’re confident no such issues exist. (As for Linux distros, the timing of new releases is entirely up to the distro’s maintainers).

Happy Thunderbirding!

Mike Leibov wrote on

I ‘ve been using TB for a few years now. Like the product very much. Strange thing happened today. TB disapeard from desktop and I can not find it to restart. I wonder what could have caused it?

Charlie Sweatpants wrote on

Been using 115 as my daily driver at work (Win10) for a week now and just wanted to say: you guys are awesome and thank you *SO* much for this. Outlook shall never darken my desktop again.

Initially I thought I’d stick with the table view, but “Cards” paired with the Vertical layout has been spectacular, quite possibly the best use of space in any desktop email client I’ve ever used. Specifically, it’s such a neat way to allow plenty of room for subject lines without short changing anything else.

My one suggestion so far, literally the only thing I miss from the table view, is one-click sorting. If I want to see all messages from a specific address, the sort is now three clicks deep. But that’s pretty damn minor.

Just dropped $10 in the donation bucket, which I know is paltry but is what my poor ass has today. Keep it up, can’t wait to see what it’s like on Android!

Jason Evangelho wrote on

It’s not paltry at all. Every donation helps! In fact, our average donation is about $12, so your contribution very much matters.

Kai BlnKgl wrote on

Hi. A lot of work has gone into this, but I am only giving TB a small window on an 11′ screen, and I hate clutter!

I appreciate what you wrote about the ‘legacy’ table view still being available and even the default, but what if I do
— NOT use the calendar and don’t want to give it any space
— NOT want a unified toolbar at the top, just the normal window header of my desktop
— NOT want buttons for the Quick Filter or for Message List Display Options
— NOT want a big New Message button in my folder column
— want to keep the height of the window header and the tab bar (set using userChrome.css) the same as I have in FF (- the screen with the two windows looks very neat this way!)

What WOULD have been nice, since the mail files tend to get very large, is on-the-fly compression. (I take old mail files and zip them, and if I need to look back, I unzip them in the right folder.) Any chance of that coming?

Would I be better off just sticking to 102.13.0? What about security updates if I want to stick to the old version?

Thanks for reading, and perhaps responding.

sdffsssd wrote on

how do i prevent update to thunderbird 115 and stick to version 102.13.0?

still no answer and still no word why you are censoring this…
and apparently also my email adress seems to be blocked, since even this “awaiting moderation” isn’t shown anymore…

just NOT answering, silently censoring without any explanation and blocking email adresses… only bastards act like this…

Hini wrote on

Hope to see the flatpak soon

JS wrote on

Hi,

After trying the new look and feel for a few days, it really does not suits me.

How can I revert to the previous layout, in particular without the unified toolbar above tabs?

Thanks

honk wrote on

I love it, great improvements in UI !!

Long life to Thunderbird!

rawderfrwe wrote on

in mozilla’s biased “comment” section only apple-polisher comments are allowed…

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Looks like this disproves your theory 😀

M L Thompson wrote on

I liked the new interface. It is definitely faster than than ver. 102.

I was very disappointed, however, that the installation only brought over the first of my four email addresses. The other three were simply ignored. I can re-set them up, but I shouldn’t have to do that.

I’m going to delete 115 and wait until this specific bug is handled appropriately.

Larry wrote on

I love Thunderbird and its continued improvement! I have used you folks for my email since I found you in 2007 for my personal email, and then for my small home business in 2012.

I an wondering if there are any plans to allow Thunderbird to download emails from the new Microsoft Exchange?

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Larry, thanks for sticking by Thunderbird since 2007! While I can’t answer your question with specifics right now, please stay tuned for *good* news on this front.

Lutz Peter wrote on

Hello,
I’ve also been using TB for some time, I hope you can turn off this preview of the mails as before? I prefer a list display of my incoming mails.

Thank you for the great work. 🙂

hnx wrote on

if i read that right, i need to set DisableAppUpdate to 0x1 in order to disable updates and AppAutoUpdate to 0x0 to disable that nagging…
how do i edit/change these policies in windows 7?

Doug wrote on

Hey, Jason! What’s up? I loved the new version and the major redesign, but I wonder if we’ll see this card view UI someday: https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/1592201016052629504/photo/1

That’s a much better card view IMHO and would be amazing to see it arriving soon.

Jason Evangelho wrote on

Hey Doug! That mockup is still our target, but we had to implement it in phases.

Comments are closed.