Mozilla plans big for Thunderbird 2019
New Delhi : As per the official Thunderbird blog post, the team has provided us with an outlook of things to come for the desktop email client. Thunderbird was moved under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation in 2017, and the first major release, Thunderbird 60, was released in 2018.
Mozilla revealed in 2015 that it wanted to hand over responsibility for the Thunderbird project even though usage was on the rise.
The then-independent Thunderbird team grew to eight full-time employees in 2018 working on the browser.
Thunderbird plans for new features and improvements in 2019. The changes range from improvement performance and user interface slowness to improving compatibility with Gmail and integrating native desktop notifications.
The Thunderbird project team plans to introduce support for Gmail labels in Thunderbird in 2019. Gmail-specific features may also be introduced or better supported in upcoming versions of the email client.
Desktop notifications, native support for them, are among things to do for 2019.
The team plans to make the use of encryption easier in Thunderbird, and work on user interface improvements. The out-of-the-box experience of the encryption functionality will be improved and it should just work without confusing the user with tech jargon or maintenance tasks.
Key improvements to be made by Thunderbird in 2019 are:
- Improve the handling of.ics (system integration, invite improvements).
- Improve mail filters (make them asynchronous, contextual filtering, e.g. globablly or per-folder, pre-filter MIME processing and more).
- Rewrite certain protocols using JavaScript
- Improve the add-ons experience.
- Exchange support (at least for Calendar).
- Improve support for open formats and structured data such as CardDAV, WebDAV, and vCard.
- Improve Thunderbird setup experience (e.g. complete package for organizations).
- Calendar improvements.
