Mozilla Thunderbird 91.2 Finally Allows OTA Upgrades from Thunderbird 78 or Earlier

The Thunderbird 91.2 open-source, free and cross-platform email, news, calendar, and chat client from Mozilla has been released earlier this week as the second major point release in the Thunderbird 91 series.

Thunderbird 91 was launched two months ago, but it wasn’t offered as an OTA (Over-the-Air) upgrade from Thunderbird 78 and earlier releases. After three minor point releases, Thunderbird 91.2 is here and enables support for OTA upgrades from earlier Thunderbird versions.

Thunderbird 91.2 is also a minor update, bringing only the ability to use a unique filename when saving a single message in the .eml file format, as well as a bunch of bug fixes. But the major change in this release is the ability to upgrade from Thunderbird 78 and earlier versions without from within the app.

Therefore, if you’re running Thunderbird 78.14, all you have to do to upgrade to Thunderbird 91.2 is to click the hamburger menu next to the search field on the toolbar and access the About Thunderbird dialog from the Help menu. You will now see the option to upgrade to Thunderbird 91.2.0.

Of course, this won’t work if you have Thunderbird installed from the software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution, but only if you’re using Mozilla Thunderbird via the binary archive downloaded from the official website.

If you’re thinking to yourself “should I upgrade to Thunderbird 91 or not,” you should know that this major update brings initial support for Matrix servers and uses Libera Chat for new chat accounts by default in the Chat component, an improved dark theme, a built-in PDF viewer, and improved CardDAV support.

Thunderbird 91 also introduces a whole new account setup wizard that opens in a tab instead of a new window, three new UI density controls, improved support for GMail accounts, support for accessing Outlook contacts, an improved printing UI, and the ability to encrypt your emails to BCC recipients too.

I think Thunderbird 91 is a worthy upgrade and, now that it also supports OTA ugprades from previous releases, there’s no excuse not to use it. Most modern GNU/Linux distributions already offer Thunderbird 91 in their repos, but if your distro doesn’t include it, please ask its maintainers to upgrade to the new series.

Source