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Mozilla Thunderbird 31 – What's New

The new edition includes some new features and all-around improvements

Jul 23, 2014 15:01 GMT  ·  By
The theme is slightly changed in color in Thunderbird 31
   The theme is slightly changed in color in Thunderbird 31

Yesterday, Mozilla has released a new version for Thunderbird for all supported platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X), its comprehensive, approachable and free email client which supports RSS feeds and other handy features. The new edition brings numerous fixes and some modifications. We're taking a look at it to see what it's all about.

For those unaware with Thunderbird's history, the developers from Mozilla have ceased to actively work on the application a while back (apart from security-related updates), letting regular programmers from the community take over and handle its implementations, since the tool is open source.

NOTE: Mozilla Thunderbird 31.0 was tested on Windows 8.1 Pro.

The first noticeable change is related to the version number, as Thunderbird has seemingly skipped 7 iterations to get from version 24 to 31. Unknowing users might fool themselves into thinking they have missed all the editions in between, but the actual purpose here was to bring the email client up to speed with Firefox, whose 31st edition was also launched yesterday.

Installation is pretty much the same as before: Thunderbird can be set as the default email client, while its maintenance service can be installed to silently upgrade the app without disturbing users via notifications.

Showing the interface in Mozilla Thunderbird 31
The slightly different interface of the new Thunderbird versionThe interface does not seem different in version 31 at a first glance. However, at a closer inspection it becomes visible that Thunderbird has dropped the predominant light blue skin and replaced it with a light grey one.

Other noticeable improvements revolve around the function for creating new messages, starting with looks. The buttons and other UI elements seem flatter now, compared with version 24. In addition, very smooth animations are subtly triggered when hovering the mouse over one of the text boxes (e.g. receiver, subject).

Showing the panel when composing a new message in Mozilla Thunderbird 31
Flatter look in the panel for composing messagesTwo new features have been integrated when it comes to typing email addresses. As we all know, Thunderbird supports autocomplete, which means that it takes into account the typed characters and automatically fills out the rest to quickly identify the matching email address. However, it could only match results if the typed information was the first part of the address.
Showing an example of the improved autocomplete function when typing email addresses in Mozilla Thunderbird
Autocomplete works when typing any part of the email address nowThis "restriction" is lifted in the new edition, as the tool can now find email addresses by specifying any part of them, whether it's the beginning, middle or end (including special characters like "." or "-" as well as the domain extension). Likewise, Thunderbird automatically completes newsgroup names when composing messages for them.

These are basically the new features available in Mozilla Thunderbird 31. Otherwise, the email client implements a long list of fixed bugs meant to improve the user's overall experience when it comes to sending and receiving messages via this app. All these technical details can be examined by checking out Mozilla Thunderbird's official release notes. For example, the favicon is not displayed next to RSS and Atom feeds, while the toolbar icon has been slightly increased in size.

The Good

Thunderbird is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, OS X) and supports a lot of handy features that many email clients lack, such as its multi-tabbed UI, RSS and Atom reader, chat for popular social networking platforms and instant messengers, toolbar to quickly filter messages and view real-time results, an activity manager that tracks all user actions taken in the app, antispam and anti-phishing, along with support for various add-ons to expand its functionality.

Since the app takes cue from Firefox as far as looks and structure are concerned, those familiarized with the popular browser shouldn't have difficulties in figuring out Thunderbird.

The Bad

Since Thunderbird was "synchronized" to Firefox as far as the version number is concerned, we actually expected new and exciting features. For example, the Australis toolbar styling is pushed forward but this look already exists in the 24th version.

The Truth

Perhaps we shall see more significant new features in future Thunderbird iterations. Nevertheless, it remains a powerful email client numerous users worldwide trusted.

NOTE: You can also read our review for Mozilla Thunderbird 24.3.0.