We love using Firefox as our base architecture, because it leverages all the very good stuff within. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface. Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. Why? Because the original pieces don’t fit anymore. Then, once you reach that center piece, you replace it, and then add back the pieces you removed with slightly different pieces. This means you have to slowly remove the blocks above it to keep the tower from collapsing. If you replace just that piece, the whole tower will crumble. But years later, you realize the crucial center piece serving as the foundation is using the wrong shape. Making major changes - as we’re doing with Supernova - requires very careful consideration.Īs you’re reading this, it might help to imagine Thunderbird as an enormous Lego tower you’ve built. Thunderbird is a monolithic application that has been developed by thousands of people over the course of two decades. What’s all this stuff about “technical debt?” Why does it need to be rebuilt? Let’s talk about how we got here, and shed some light on the the complicated history of Thunderbird’s development. Thunderbird: An Old, Fragile LEGO Tower Photo by Mourizal Zativa on Unsplash Inside those objectives there are hundreds of very large steps that need to happen, and achieving everything will require a lot of time and resources. Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface.Make the code base leaner and more reliable, rewrite ancient code, remove technical debt.Throughout the next 3 years, the Thunderbird project is aiming at these primary objectives: Simply “adding stuff on top” of a crumbling architecture is not sustainable, and we can’t keep ignoring it. This is not an easy task, but it’s necessary to guarantee the sustainability of the project for the next 20 years. Thunderbird is undergoing a massive rework from the ground up to get rid of the technical and interface debt accumulated over the past 10 years. It’s a modernized overhaul of the software, both visually and technically. With this year’s release of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova,” we’re doing much more than just another yearly release. 3 Objectives For The Next 3 Yearsīefore we really dig in, let’s start with the future. The default thunderbird directory is "~/.var/app//.thunderbird".Watch our companion video, hosted by Alex, which goes into even more detail. The feature to "Start Thunderbird when Birdtray starts" needs the flathub thunderbird installed by default. Has configurable "New Email" functionality, allowing pre-configured email templates.Can monitor that Thunderbird is running, and indicate it if you accidentally closed it.Can launch Thunderbird when Birdtray starts, and terminate it when Birdtray quits (configurable).This allows you, for example, to have blue unread count for personal emails, red unread count for work emails, and green unread count if both folders have unread mail. You can choose different font colors for different email accounts.You can configure which accounts you want to check for unread emails on.It can hide the Thunderbird window, and restore it.This means it does not need any extensions, and thus is immune to any future extension API changes in Thunderbird Birdtray checks the unread e-mail status directly by reading the Thunderbird email search database.
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