TB31: What new features to expect, compared to TB24.x?

[foobar12345]

Next version in 6 weeks will be a "Major+7" update (24->31). Will there any new features except "Stability and performance improvements"?

[WaltS48]

They need help testing. Why not install a beta, create a new profile and find out.

The next major release of Thunderbird is around the corner and needs some love | NaN

Don't know what happened to that 2nd beta for TB 30 though.

[rsx11m]

There aren't necessarily any really big new features that could be highlighted, but lots of small changes and improvements. The release notes are rather sparse as information source, but for each beta release there are more comprehensive bug lists which give a glimpse on what was going on (admittedly, not sorted in any way, and a wild mixture of backend or test fixes with actual feature development):

• http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/25.0beta/releasenotes/buglist.html
• http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/26.0beta/releasenotes/buglist.html
• http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/27.0beta/releasenotes/buglist.html
• http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/28.0beta/releasenotes/buglist.html
• http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/29.0beta/releasenotes/buglist.html
• http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/30.0beta/releasenotes/buglist.html
• http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/31.0beta/releasenotes/buglist.html

[WaltS48]

So far I have noticed a new Privacy tab in Options, improvements to Chat notifications and favicons for feeds. Almost forgot the change in background for the fields in the composition window.

Edit: Did forget Autocomplete of newsgroups in the composition window.

[Mouse5]

Thunderbird is just about Dead IMO. still works great as a email client though. but IMO i thionk they should get rid of the Hamburger icon in TB as its plainly useless . . .

[rsx11m]

still works great as a email client though.

Interesting statement - that it's primary function.

Yes, some of the UX decisions made in the past were a bit questionable. Why "dead"? It works, and I prefer that they don't keep adding features or making major changes just for the sake of adding features or making major changes...

[foobar12345]

Why "dead"? It works, and I prefer that they don't keep adding features or making major changes just for the sake of adding features or making major changes...

About UX features I mostly agree. But what happens if there will be some major updates to one of the protocols used in the "email world" (POP, IMAP, SMTP, TLS, or a whole new protocol, ...). Can we be sure that Thunderbird will quickly support/implement it with good stability?

[rsx11m]

While David Bienvenu was certainly a major driver for those MailNews Core issues (and apparently got disgruntled for good by the Mozilla politicians tinkering around with Thunderbird, too bad), there are a lot of capable people from both the Thunderbird and the SeaMonkey side actively working on this code. TLS is Core, and right now they tend to screw up things for comm-central than developing new code (current breakage on trunk was caused by removal of some SSL code from mozilla-central). Just recently, TLS 1.2 support was (finally, one might say) wrapped up and enabled by default.

[wsmwk]

Thunderbird stability continues quite good. Compare TB crash rates https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/daily?f ... t=Generate to Firefox crash rates https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/daily?f ... t=Generate ... Thunderbird beta build crash rate is lower than Firefox release build crash rate.