14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical just announced that a number of Thunderbird vulnerabilities have been closed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04, which also updates the version of the browser to 38.2.0.
The Ubuntu maintainers for this package haven't been quick to integrate the latest version of the application and it took them quite a while to get them into place. We praised the speed of the maintainers when they had to add the new Firefox 40 in the repos, but many users complained that the same thing is not happening with Thunderbird as well. To be fair, Thunderbird 38.2.0 was released on August 14 and today is August 25, so it's been more than 10 days.
It's not clear why this is happening lately. In the past, Firefox and Thunderbird were upgraded really fast, but the email client has been lagging. Maybe it's no longer a concern for the Ubuntu maintainers, but the users have noticed this as well.
What's new in Thunderbird 38.2.0
Even if we make a big deal out of the fact that Thunderbird 38.2.0 hasn't landed quick enough, we still have to acknowledge that new Thunderbird versions have ceased to be interesting a while ago. In any case, some security issues are corrected from time to time, so upgrading it from regularly is actually a good idea.
"Gary Kwong, Christian Holler, and Byron Campen discovered multiple memory safety issues in Thunderbird. If a user were tricked in to opening a specially crafted message, an attacker could potentially exploit these to cause a denial of service via application crash, or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking Thunderbird," reads the security notice. This is just one of issues that have been corrected in this release.
According to the official changelog, the hardware acceleration has been disabled by default to avoid crashing Thunderbird, and another few crashes have fixed as well. To get the latest version of Thunderbird in Ubuntu you just have to upgrade the operating system.