Thunderbird Photon Design refresh and WebExtensions
With Mozilla changing core features of Firefox and cutting ties with Thunderbird, it was not really clear what direction Thunderbird's development would take.
It was clear however that Mozilla's decision to drop legacy add-ons to embrace WebExtensions impacted Thunderbird.
A blog post on the official Thunderbird blog highlights what the Thunderbird developers have in store for the email client.
First the good news: Thunderbird won't drop legacy add-on support (just yet). The stable version of the email client is version 52.5.0 at the time of writing, the next major release probably Thunderbird 59.0 or 60.0 if Thunderbird follows Mozilla in postponing the next ESR release.
Add-on authors need to work on their extensions however to make them compatible with current beta versions of the email client. This does not mean full rewrites as WebExtensions, but it still means that developers need to modify extensions to make them compatible.
Information on the required modifications are available on the Thunderbird Wiki. Thunderbird will support WebExtensions, as well as legacy add-ons and hybrid extensions.
The team has not made an announcement in regards to the end of support of the legacy add-on system. It is unclear at this point in time if this is going to happen (likely), and when it is going to happen. The most pressing question is this: will the next ESR version of Thunderbird support legacy extensions?
Thunderbird 57 and newer versions of the email client come with a Photon design refresh. You can see this in recent beta releases of the email client. The screenshot that is attached to the article highlights the new interface.
It is not a massive change, but you will notice some changes such as rectangular tabs instead of curved ones.
The team is in a transition phase right now. The blog post highlights that four hires were made in 2016 and 2017 to strengthen development, infrastructure and communication. Plans are underway to make Thunderbird.net the new home of the project.
Closing Words
Thunderbird is not dead; that is a good thing. Development continues and it is a good thing that support for legacy add-ons remains a thing, at least for the foreseeable future.
Now You: Which email client / service do you use currently?
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!