Download Mozilla Thunderbird 78.0

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 78.0 of Thunderbird. Thunderbird is an open source client for e-mail and newsgroups, with features such as support for various mail and news accounts, a spam filter, spell checker, and a customizable appearance. In version 78 we find, among other things, a dark mode and other parts of the interface, such as the icons and the screen for composing an email, have also been overhauled. Furthermore, the Lightning calendar add-on is now a standard part of the program, there is a new wizard for the first use and only MailExtensions add-ons are supported. An automatic update from 68.x to 78.x will not work until version 78.2. The complete changelog for this release looks like this:

What’s New:

• New Account Hub for centralized account setup
• Redesigned recipient address fields (To, Cc, Bcc) as single-line input fields (pills) for multiple addresses instead of one line per address. More improvements to come.
• Color customization of Folder Pane icons
• Allow selecting messages via selection boxes instead of classic selection. “Select Messages” column needs to be selected via the thread pane’s column picker.
• “Delete” action column in thread pane (message list). “Select Messages” column needs to be selected via the thread pane’s column picker.
• Themes can be previewed in the Add-On Manager
• Minimize to tray support added for Windows
• New config option to anonymize message date header
• Global Search menu item in app menu
• Additional Enterprise policies
• Calendar: Added ICS import support to -file command line option
• Calendar: Add event preview to ICS import dialog
• Chat: OTR messaging support
• Chat: IRC echo-message capability

Changes:

• Add-on support: As of version 78.0, Thunderbird only supports MailExtensions and MailExtension Experiments. Restartless add-ons and non-restartless legacy add-ons using XUL overlays are no longer supported.
• Linux minimum runtime requirements have changed: GTK 3.14, GLIBC 2.17, libstdc++ 4.8.1 Details
• Thunderbird Options/Preferences tab redesigned and with new user interface
• Account creation dialog redesigned and with new user interface
• Account Manager moved to a tab
• Add-ons manager with new user interface and notifications
• Improved “Recent” folder list for “Move to” and “Copy to” in message context menu
• Improved UI of global search results tab
• Improvements to the location bar of a tab displaying web pages
• Use scalable icons throughout Thunderbird to improve support for HiDPI monitors and dark mode
• Thunderbird will now ask for OS account password before displaying saved passwords
• Address books are now stored as SQLite databases to prepare for future addressbook improvements. Existing address books in MAB format (using a Mork database) will be converted.
• New parser and formatter for vCard. vCard versions 3.0 and 4.0 are now supported.
• Various theme and dark mode improvements
• Various look and feel improvements
• Improved dialog for folder compaction (purging of deleted messages)
• Graphics hardware acceleration is now enabled by default
• TLS 1.0 and 1.1 disabled
• Calendar: The Lightning calendar add-on is now integrated into Thunderbird
• Calendar: Lightning version removed from Thunderbird user agent string
• Calendar: Web Calendar Access Protocol (WCAP) support removed
• Calendar: Storage access is now asynchronous to improve performance
• Calendar: Location URLs are now clickable
• Addon Developers: Updates to and expansion of MailExtensions APIs. Details

Fixes:

• Password display font had characters that were difficult to read
• When copying messages from an IMAP folder to a local folder, offline store wasn’t used
• While Thunderbird was in safe mode, the help menu did not offer an item to restart with add-ons enabled
• Mailbox quotas not displayed correctly
• Images not rotated when composing a message
• Email addresses sometimes displayed incorrectly in message composer
• Many accessibility fixes and improvements: message composer, account setup, attachment pane
• Mailbox format conversion fixes
• Address book improvements: exporting, editing contacts, contact photos
• Chat: Renaming contacts in context menu did not work
• Calendar: Task and event dialogs were sometimes too small for their content
• Calendar: URLs in the event reminder dialog were not clickable
• Various security fixes

Known Issues:

• Mail header toolbar (Reply, Forward, Archive, Junk buttons) no longer configurable
• Preferences search not available
• Drag and drop of address book contacts not working in some situations