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Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: July 2024

16 responses

Hello Thunderbird Community! As we say goodbye to the month of July, we look back at our major accomplishments and the release of a new ESR version.

ESR Released!

Thunderbird 128 “Nebula” is finally out and we couldn’t be more thrilled. 

We fixed more than 1400 bugs, included multiple new features, cleaned up a lot of old code, and enabled Rust development. There’s too much to list so if you’re interested please visit our fancy 128 What’s New Page, blog post, and Release notes to get a much deeper overview of all the juicy things you will get.

We do lots of QA and beta testing, but sometimes major issues are only exposed after significant public testing. That’s why we always roll out a new ESR release gradually. Once we’re confident no problems or regressions exist, we’ll turn on automatic updates — probably towards the end of August.

However, we have enabled manual updates for Windows and macOS users. If you open the About dialogue, you should receive a prompt to update. 

If you’re using Flatpak or Snap on Linux, you are probably on version 128 already. For those who receive Thunderbird updates through their Linux distribution’s repositories, the experience may vary depending on the package maintainer. We don’t have control over that, so please reach out to your distro’s maintainer and ask if they have a timeline.

Linux System Tray

A 25-year-old bug was finally fixed!

If you’re running Daily on Linux, you probably noticed a fancy new system tray icon with a quick action to shut down Thunderbird. This is merely the first step towards a more native integration of Thunderbird inside your operating system, not just Linux.

Stay tuned for more improvements and expansion of this new feature. We promise we’ll try to not take another 25 years!

Folder Compaction Cleanup

Our fight to improve folder compaction and solve for good the issue of tmp files bubbling up in size seems to have come to an end. It was challenging to identify the problem, and even more to create a consistent reproducible scenario.

As all the users affected seem to confirm the disappearance of the issue, we took some time to create a migration to clean up those large leftover temporary files polluting your profile.

We’re gonna run this code in Daily and Beta for a few more weeks to make sure it’s safe and tested properly before uplifting it to ESR.

Exchange

As we continue the implementation of a few more features to make sure the full experience is reliable and complete-looking, we decided to switch the preference ON by default on Daily, in order to invite more testing and gather feedback and bugs as early as possible.

If you’re running Daily and have an Exchange account, please consider setting it up in Thunderbird and report any bug you might encounter.

As usual, if you want to see things as they land you can always check the pushlog and try running daily, which would be immensely helpful for catching bugs early.

See ya next month,

Alessandro Castellani (he, him)
Director, Desktop and Mobile Apps

If you’re interested in joining the technical discussion around Thunderbird development, consider joining one or several of our mailing list groups here.

Tags: Dev Digest Exchange Linux Nebula

16 responses

Philipp wrote on

Kudos to the whole Thunderbird team for the great release and the hard work on improving Thunderbird!
And thank you Alessandro for the interesting development digests, I highly appreciate them.

My personal Thunderbird upgraded to 128.0.1esr unintentionally after I opened the “About dialogue”.
Unlike with earlier ESR releases, I did not receive a promt to update as you state above.
Now that I am forced 😉 to try Nebula, I seem to have hit a bug that blocks me from using Thunderbird 128 at all.

blank mail tab after automatic upgrade to Thunderbird 128.0.1esr
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1911040

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hi Philipp! Thanks for the comments and also, thank you, seriously, for filing a bug! I know it’s been a few days since you’ve posted this, but did any of the suggestions in the comments help? Also, it seems like the team is responding – Magnus, who asked about the Error Console, is a staff member!

Joe wrote on

Support for Exchange in Daily – is it only IMAP at this moment?

Giuseppe wrote on

Non posso istallare thunderg nel mio
Cellulare

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Currently, you can download K-9 on the Google Play store or F-Droid. K-9 will rebrand to Thunderbird for Android soon.

Silvia wrote on

Dear Mr. Castellani, a lot of talking in your message but not good for those users that are not expert and also old, very old, not so familiar with technology and technicality.
A big description but what will be the changes that will affect the use of the new version of Thunderbird?
Ask the community, never a real person that listen to your problem, difficulties and that guides you.
I do not know if I want to update to the new edition, I have been able just now to resolve why I was not able any more to find the tool bar and in particular where to tick for receiving a successfull delivery notice.
Have a nice day.
Silvia Chiaramello

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hi Silvia! These monthly posts are meant for a more technical audience, but having regular updates on new features and how to find and use them is a good idea. This is something the Community and Support teams (which is about three to four people now!) can talk about, if you’d like to tell us what changes would be most helpful to explain. We are planning for more guides for regular (aka non-technical) users, though that may take a little longer now because of changes to our already small team.

John Stevens wrote on

Thank you for all of your hard work, as cited above.The information in this email was also very helpful.

John

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks John!

Uri Liebeskind wrote on

Thank TB-Team you for your great work!

However for years I am waiting that the HTML-Editing of TB to be fixed. TB creates the most horrible HTML-code of any application I can thing off – worse than MS Outlook and worse than MS Word. And I thing this is a shame and it is extremly annoing.

I even do not know which developer would feel in charge for such an request. Maybe you can forward my request to an developer.

The html code of TB is extremely ugly. Excessive and unnecessary font tags are inserted very wildly, although I did not change the font even one time in my email. I have set Open Sans as default.

Please let me show a simple example. I have created a very simple mail text and the generated html code is this:

Hello World,

this is our first list:

bullet 1
bullet 2 with some
colored formatting

bullet 3

now a nubered list:

num1
num2 with some bold formatting

num3

but what if we need more formatting variants, such as different font size?
is this handled well?

Apparently when moving the cursor in TB it will be located randomly inside or outside of html tags, which is not visible while editing. This causes paste- or delete-actions to break the html structure.

While editing a longer email text repeatedly some text gets deleted and other text gets moved and other text of the email text gets pasted or added. After only a few of such modifications due to TBs unnecessary and excessive insertion of html tags and due to its random cursor placement within or outside of html tags, TB cannot keep track of the html structure and breaks the html structure making navigation and editing in the email a nightmare and even impossible.

After a while of editing a html mail in TB moving with the cursor one character left or right can cause jumps to any random position in the email text. Inserting or pasting text can cause totally unpredictable side effects such as crashing the entire formatting.

If have to write a longer html email text I have to write the email text as plain html code in a text editor and then paste the text into TB, because it is impossible to write a longer email text with html formatting in TB.

I have donated multiple times to the TB project and I am willing to donate much more, because I appreciate the work done by the TB developers. But I have also promised to myself that I will not donate to TB anymore until the horrible html editor of TB will be fixed. I really do not get this, that TB is less capable of creating working html code than MS word. The html editing behavior of TB is on the lowest level that can be imagined.

Kind regards,
Uri

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thank you for the feedback! We know there are a lot of things to update and improve, and with a small team it can be hard to get all of those things done, especially when you have technical debt and a lot of old code and a small team to work on this. I will relay your comment to the developers, and in the meantime, have you tried this Add-on? I don’t know if it will improve your experience now, but it seems like it is worth trying! https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/html-source-editor/?src=search

Philipp wrote on

Thank you for your answer, Monica!
I am away from my installation for the next 2 1/2 weeks and can only report back afterwards.

Raymond J Norton OAM wrote on

Thank you Thunderbird your program is good and I would wish for no better, a user for many years also a contributor.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thank you so much, both for using us for so long and being a contributor! We really appreciate it!

Larry Miller wrote on

Will Thunderbird 128 “cync” across multiple devices?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Sync will be coming in a future point release! We’ll have our next developer update coming within the next week or two, and Alex should have updates on how Sync is progressing and how soon that point release with it might be.

Comments are closed.