Thunderbird 38 Release Notes | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird 38 Release Notes

mozilla.org

30 pointsconductor18 comments

Big news in this release is that the "lightning" calendar extension is now bundled together. I've been using it for a while now, since my department uses a CalDav calendar server. Like the rest of Thunderbird, I can make it do what I want.

I use gmail's web interface for personal mail but I'll never give up Thunderbird for work. It's mature and sane.

I really thought that this shipped as standard for a long time now. But then again, it's been too long since I've used my Thunderbird install. I'm mainly using webmail and my phone mail app.

I thought Thunderbird development was announced [1] to have stopped near 3 years go.

Am I mistaken?

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/so-thats-it-for-thunderbird...

There's still community involvement.

Thunderbird has been maintained with security fixes since then. And the underlying engine, Gecko, stays pace with Firefox ESR, so that it can stay up to date with security fixes as well. Firefox ESR just moved to 38.0 so Thunderbird does now as well.

There are no new major features or anything coming to Thunderbird, just bug fixes and security updates. So, it's still the best email client.

That's referring to contributions by paid staff. It's still an ongoing open-source project that may be contributed to by the community.

That is what was once announced, but (a couple years) after that Mozilla announcement, control was indeed transferred to a new group of people who now govern the project and do indeed work on new features as well.

There are more details on the website, e.g.: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2014/11/thunderbird-reo...

There are volunteers and paid developers from other companies (Fastmail, Softmaker) working on or contributing to various parts of Thunderbird.

that's kind of funny: fastmail's good web interface and caldav support is the reason i stopped using thunderbird.

I hope they've fixed the missing menu bar problem on linux, I've been hobbling around without the proper menus for a month or two now. The simplified one is missing a few things I use often, like message box search.

I've been relying on these Moz products and their ancestors for twenty years now and not a big fan of their recent regressions, e.g. where they decide to remove widgets to compete with Chrome. With this menu bar problem, it's not yet clear to me if it is a bug, or by design.

I could go on. :/

Other big news in this release is the shift (at least for a few releases) to match Firefox release numbers, so it's jumping now from 31.7.0 up to 38.0.1. They note on the Release Notes that "There was no Thunderbird 38.0 release." but neglect to include that there was also no 37, 36, 35, 34, 33 or 32 release.

I'm just waiting for the naming convention to change over to randomly-chosen members of Canidae so we can be more like Apple.

The Thunderbird version numbers follow the Firefox ESR version numbers.

> Other big news in this release is the shift ... to match Firefox release numbers, so it's jumping now from 31.7.0 up to 38.0.1.

Apparently you've been out of touch for the last several years. Thunderbird has used Firefox-like ESR branch numbering for shipping releases since version 17.

Clearly I need to watch this better.

I'm excited to try out the maildir support. I've been looking forward to this coming out.

I don't really understand the Thunderbird to IceDove flow, I wonder when these features will make it to Debian unstable/testing?

The OS X .dmg seems to be damaged. I get a 'no mountable file systems' error.

"The release is still in process", according to Kent James (via IRC), which may explain why the .dmg doesn't work.

Hope this release got the SPECIAL-USE implemented, but could not find anywhere.

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