New in Thunderbird 60

Revision Information
  • Revision id: 164671
  • Created:
  • Creator: Wayne Mery
  • Comment: minor text
  • Reviewed: No
  • Ready for localization: No
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This article describes the major changes visible to users in Thunderbird version 60.0. Full details of all the changes can be found in the Thunderbird 60 release notes.

End of support for Windows XP and Vista

Consistent with the withdrawl of support for Windows XP and Vista for Firefox 60, Thunderbird no longer supports these two legacy operating systems Thunderbird no longer supports these two legacy operating systems. Thunderbird 52 is the last version of Thunderbird available for those two operating systems.

Add-ons not marked as compatible with Thunderbird 60 by their authors will be disabled

Due to significant changes in the way add-ons are managed and run in Thunderbird, version 60 will not automatically load add-ons that have not been marked compatible for version 60. Therefore, you may find some add-ons disabled in version 60 that had worked in version 52. The decision for making this change was not lightly made, but it is felt that the user experience will be better because the potential for non-working add-ons or add-ons breaking Thunderbird outweighs the convenience of automatically accepting unupdated add-ons.

New menu location of add-on options

Options for add-ons is no longer managed from the add-on manager tab. A new menu item is available in Add-on Options menu item is available in the Tools menu.

MainMenuBarOptions

Or if you use the application menu on the toolbar, hovering over the add-on entry or clicking > will display list add-ons which have setable options.

AppmenuShowingADDOnOptions

Changes to date time settings

Thunderbird now has an option to specify if date and time formats used in the program should follow the operating system, or the locale of the installed version of Thunderbird. In other words, an US English Thunderbird can use, for example, German formats.

Regional settings

Compose window changes

During address entry, the matching part of the address is now shown in bold

To make it clearer why a particular address has been included in the auto fill list, the portion of the address that matches the typed text is now highlighted

When writing a message, a delete button now allows the removal of a recipient

When you hover the mouse over the addressing labels (ReplyTo:, To:, CC:, BCC:, Newsgroup:) an X button is now displayed to allow the deletion of that entry.

Demonstration of the delete button


Address Book

It is now possible to set a default Address Book which will be selected upon opening the address books. To set the default, right click a folder and select the set as default entry from the menu displayed. Set Default address book Windows

WebExtension themes are now enabled

Limited support for the Web extensions style add-ons used in Thunderbird will see the support of themes using that technology.

Calendar

Provide an option to display locations for events

Calendar events will now show a location as well as the event name. Calendar:Location Display

The option that controls this is located in the Calendar > Views tab Location of Display location option

Copying, cutting an pasting of recurring events and tasks

Like before for deleting or modifying, new there is a prompt to select whether to apply copying or cutting just to the selected occurrence, or the entire series of a recurring event or task.

Lightning Copy Occurrence Prompt

If more then one local calendar or calendar subscriptions are available, the target calendar for pasting of calendar items can now be directly selected from a list of all writable calendars.

Lightning Paste Target Selection

Provide the ability for sending/not sending meeting notifications directly

When dealing with meetings, there is - except of drag and drop operations - no longer a popup asking whether to notify the other participants about your changes. Instead, this is controlled within the respective dialogs or context menus directly.

Along with this change, support for creating email invitations compatible with Outlook 2002 has been removed.

Allow to enforce the use of email invitation for meeting for users of CalDAV calendars

Some CalDAV servers are configured to take care of inviting other users on the same calendar server when setting up a meeting. This would prevent sending email invitations to other participants from Thunderbird when setting up a meeting. For those calendars, the use of email invitations can be enforced now regardless of the server configuration.

Reminders can be dismissed even for read-only calendar

If a reminder for an event or task stored in a read-only calendar pops up, it can be dismissed now. Unlike for writable calendars, snoozing of reminders is still not possible for those calendar items.

Lightning Reminder Dialog RO

Along with that change, the scope of the option to show missed reminders was limited to writable calendars.

Show Missed Reminders Options

Maildir Experimental feature

conversion of folders from mbox to maildir format and vice versa

In keeping with the long term goal of implementing a maildir like storage system in Thunderbird, tools to convert existing folders to and from the maildir format are included in this release. More information on the maildir implementation in general can be found here. Everyone using maildir needs to be aware that it is still experimental and use may reveal further unknown bugs that result in dataloss.