Mozilla Announces Major Thunderbird Update, Including Better Windows 10 Support

[The AchieVer]

Thunderbird continues to be one of the most advanced email clients available for download on desktop platforms, and despite Mozilla originally planning to give up on the app, the company now wants to improve it substantially with updates released during the course of 2019.

In an announcement published a few days ago, Mozilla says one of the areas where the development team would focus is making the application substantially faster.

“This is an area where I think we will see some of the best improvements in Thunderbird for 2019, as we look into methods for testing and measuring slowness – and then put our engineers on architecting solutions to these pain points. Beyond that, we will be looking into leveraging new, faster technologies in rewriting parts of Thunderbird as well as working toward a multi-process Thunderbird,” Mozilla Community Manager Ryan Sipes explained in a blog post.

Support for Windows 10 notification system

Additionally, Mozilla says it wants Thunderbird to be more beautiful but also to support modern operating systems, including Windows 10.

As a result, the email app will integrate the built-in notification system, in an effort to make Thunderbird feel more native on the desktop.

At the same time, Mozilla wants Thunderbird to get support for the modern Gmail experience that’s already available on the web.

“One area of useability that we are planning on addresssing in 2019 is integration improvements in various areas. One of those in better GMail support, as one of the biggest Email providers it makes sense to focus some resources on this area. We are looking at addressing GMail label support and ensuring that other features specific to the GMail experience translate well into Thunderbird,” Sipes explained.

At this point, there’s no ETA as to when major updates would begin shipping, but it’s pretty clear that 2019 is going to be a busy year for the development team.

 

source

[Karlston]

Thunderbird: big plans for 2019

The Thunderbird team provided us with an outlook of things to come for the desktop email client in a new post on the official Thunderbird blog.

 

Mozilla revealed in 2015 that it wanted to hand over responsibility for the Thunderbird project even though usage was on the rise.

 

Thunderbird was moved under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation in 2017, and the first major release, Thunderbird 60, was released in 2018.

 

The then-independent Thunderbird team grew to eight full-time employees in 2018 working on the browser.

 

Plans are underway to increase the number of full-time employees to 14 in early 2019; the Thunderbird team is made up of engineers for the most part that work on "making Thunderbird more stable, faster, and easier to use".

Thunderbird in 2019

 

The near-doubling of the team of engineers that works on Thunderbird full-time gives the team flexibility in regards to development priorities. New features and improvements are planned for 2019: from improvement performance and user interface slowness to improving compatibility with Gmail and integrating native desktop notifications.

 

The Thunderbird project team plans to introduce support for Gmail labels in Thunderbird in 2019. Other, unmentioned, Gmail-specific features may also be introduced or better supported in upcoming versions of the email client.

 

Desktop notifications, native support for them, is another item that is on the to-do list for 2019. Support for desktop notifications makes Thunderbird "feel more native" and improve notification management as well.

 

The team plans to make the use of encryption easier in Thunderbird, and work on user interface improvements. The out-of-the-box experience of the encryption functionality will be improved and it should just work without confusing the user with tech jargon or maintenance tasks.

 

A detailed roadmap for 2019 was published on the official Thunderbird Mailing list. Key improvements not mentioned already include:

• Improve the handling of.ics (system integration, invite improvements).
• Improve mail filters (make them asynchronous, contextual filtering, e.g. globablly or per-folder, pre-filter MIME processing and more).
• Rewrite certain protocols using JavaScript
• Improve the add-ons experience.
• Exchange support (at least for Calendar).
• Improve support for open formats and structured data such as CardDAV, WebDAV, and vCard.
• Improve Thunderbird setup experience (e.g. complete package for organizations).
• Calendar improvements.

Closing Words

The parting ways with Mozilla appears to have been positive for the development of the Thunderbird email client. 2019 could be the year of a turnaround in development; more engineers working on Thunderbird, fixing long-standing issues, improving support for popular features, and introducing new features to the email client.

 

The future looks bright; the Thunderbird team relies on donations for the most part to fund development and maintenance. Interested users may also get involved in various areas including development, documentation or translation.

 

Source: Thunderbird: big plans for 2019 (gHacks - Martin Brinkmann)