This is Thunderbird's upcoming redesigned Calendar

Work on the next major release of the open source email client Thunderbird is in full swing. The developers have now published a preview of the planned Calendar changes in the new major release.

Thunderbird Supernova, that is the name of the next major version of the email client, will reinvent the email client according to the development team. While that is often cause for concern for long-standing users of a software, it appears that this should be less of a concern for Thunderbird users.

The new version features a modernized interface, but also features that many existing users found missing in the current version. Besides the ability to sync data between different Thunderbird installations, courtesy of Firefox Sync, it is the Android version that needs to be mentioned specifically. Thunderbird is a desktop only email client at the time, which means that users need to use a different app on their mobile devices.

The built-in calendar is getting a new design as well. The team highlighted some of the changes scheduled for the Supernova release in a new blog post on the official Thunderbird website.

The team notes that the highlighted design has been made to look busy on purpose, that there will be options to change the density, that many visual changes will be customizable, and that everything should be considered in development at this point.

One of the interesting changes of the redesign is that users may select to collapse certain days of the week in monthly and weekly view; this is done to increase the space for the important days. A work week may be from Monday to Friday, and users may want to collapse Saturday and Sunday in the views to get more space for the important days of the week.

Thunderbird's development team promises lots of customization options. These include, among others, the ability to hide color and icons, collapse or completely remove weekends, or swap colors.

The event view is getting a modernization as well.

Details such as location, attendees or date/time have a better visibility in the new dialog. It takes one click to open the preview screen, and another to edit it. Customizations will be available to change the click behavior, e.g., to go to the edit screen with a single click, effectively skipping the preview window altogether.

Closing Words

It will take some time before the next major version of Thunderbird is released. It looks as if the team is focusing on modernizing the client, adding community-requested features, and all of that without forgetting customization options and user choice in the process.

Now you: what do you expect from the upcoming Thunderbird release?

This is Thunderbird's upcoming redesigned Calendar