Thunderbird 78 Released

Editorial Staff

July 16, the development team behind “Thunderbird” released the latest major release “Thunderbird 78”. Thunderbird is an open-source email client. It provides features like email, news feed, chat, and calendar. The development of Thunderbird is operated from MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary owned by Mozilla Foundation.

Thunderbird 78 is a major release after Thunderbird 68, released in August 2018. It Is an Extended Support Release (ESR) for enterprises.

Account Setup window has been updated, and the new Account Hub allows centralized account setup.

As the email compose window has been updated, now users can find features more easily. Recipient address field has been redesigned to show multiple addresses in a single line.

Dark mode is updated to bring a sophisticated look. When dark mode is enabled in the OS settings, Thunderbird will prioritize the settings. With scalable icons, Thunderbird now offers improved support for dark mode and HiDPI monitors. This release has improved the UI of global search results tab.

Lightning calendar and tasks add-on are now a part of the application, which makes it possible to access these features when installing Thunderbird. This will become a base where Thunderbird team will work to add feature improvements in Calendar.

As to add-on support, this release only supports MailExtentions and MailExtension Experiments. It no longer supports restartless add-ons and non-restarless legacy add-ons using XUL.

In regards to the popular add-on Enigmail, users are recommended to wait until the automatic update rolls out to ensure their encrypted email settings are properly imported into Thunderbird’s new built-in OpenPGP encrypted email feature. (OpenPGP is disabled by default as it is still work in progress.  It is planned to become stable in 78.2.)

TLS 1.0 and11 are disabled. Linux minimum requirements have changed to GTK 3.14, GLIBC 2,17, and libstdc++4.8.1. (As to Windows, 7 and above, and macOS, v10.9 and above.) This release also includes many other new features and improvements.

Thunderbird
https://www.thunderbird.net/