A new version of the email client is now available for users

Aug 26, 2020 13:21 GMT  ·  By

If you’re one of the many Mozilla Thunderbird users, you’d better check for updates because the parent company has just rolled out a new version of the app.

Currently one of the most popular email clients out there, Mozilla Thunderbird is getting regular updates, albeit in most of the cases, these new releases only include additional polishing and bug fixes.

Firefox 78.2.0 perfectly aligns with this approach, and the version number is the first indicator the focus in this update is on improving the performance of the app and resolving bugs here and there.

First and foremost, there’s an important mention that concerns OpenPGP, which was supposed to be enabled by default with this release. Mozilla says this change has been pushed back, with additional information to be shared at a later time.

“Originally it was announced to enable OpenPGP by default in version 78.2.0. It has been decided to slightly postpone this for final changes and testing by volunteers. See the wiki for how to enable and help with testing,” the dev team explained.

There are five different notable changes in this new update, and two of them are related to OpenPGP. More specifically, beginning with this new version of Thunderbird, the OpenPGP key generation is automatically disabled if no email account is configured. And then, Thunderbird 78.2.0 also encrypts the saved drafts when OpenPGP is enabled.

Another change concerns the Twitter integration, as the dev team has decided to remove the search for this service completely. So starting with this update, you’re no longer allowed to search Twitter for certain information.

Today’s update also introduces theme support for the calendar event summary dialog, while also enabling MailExtensions caching by requiring some APIs to use defineLazyPreferenceGetter.

As far as the bugfixes are concerned, there are plenty of them, and once again, several are aimed at the OpenPGP support. More specifically, Thunderbird 78.2.0 resolves a problem breaking down the search feature in the OpenPGP Key Manager, as well as the Key Properties dialog that was sometimes too small.

The email app also includes address book performance optimizations and resolves an issue breaking down the new mail account window from Account Settings, which sometimes failed to open. And beginning with this update, the signature should no longer be lost after closing the account settings, Mozilla explains in the official release notes of today’s build.

You can check out the full changelog in the box after the jump.

“Just like the previous version, there’s an important warning for add-ons, as Thunderbird may no longer work with older extensions due to switch to MailExtensions. As of version 78.0, Thunderbird only supports MailExtensions. Your favorite add-ons may not have been updated for compatibility. At this time, users of the Enigmail Add-on should not update to Thunderbird 78,” Mozilla explains.

Thunderbird 78.2.0 can be downloaded using the built-in automatic update engine, but this is only available if you’re already on version 78. On the other hand, if your device is running Thunderbird 68 or earlier, today’s update needs to be downloaded manually, as this older release does not support the automatic update to Thunderbird 78.

The system requirements haven’t changed in any way, so on Windows devices, you must be running at least Windows 7 to install the new Thunderbird version – keep in mind, however, that Windows 7 is no longer support since January this year, so the upgrade to a newer Windows version is recommended.

On Linux, GTK+ 3.14 or later is recommended, while in order to run Thunderbird 78 on an Apple computer you need at least macOS 10.9.

Thunderbird 78.2.0