Mozilla Thunderbird 78.3 Is Out and You Can Finally Upgrade from Earlier Versions

Mozilla Thunderbird 78.3

Mozilla Thunderbird 78.3 open-source and free email client has arrived with more improvements and bug fixes, and you can now finally upgrade from older Thunderbird releases.

When Thunderbird 78 launched earlier this year, it didn’t support automatic upgrades from version 68 or earlier. Automatic upgrade was blocked intentionally due to the revamped extension system that only supports MailExtensions, not classic extensions, to no break your Thunderbird installations.

Three months later, Mozilla enabled automatic upgrades in Thunderbird with version 78.2.2 released a couple of weeks ago. Now Thunderbird 78.3 is out and it disables the installation of “legacy” MailExtensions.

However, this mainly affects Mac and Windows users, not Linux users who mostly update Thunderbird to new releases from the software repositories of their GNU/Linux distributions. Automatic upgrades are blocked by default for Mozilla products in Linux distros.

But, if you prefer to run Thunderbird from the binary you’ve downloaded from the Mozilla website, you’ll now be able to upgrade it to the 78 series. Probably you won’t be doing that since you can also download a newer release from Mozilla’s FTP server if you like using the email client without it being installed.

Mozilla Thunderbird 78.3 is packed with even more improvements, especially around the OpenPGP implementation. For example,  the decryption performance has been improved for large messages, the external key user interface is no longer being displayed if it’s disabled, and newly created key pairs are now automatically selected for use.

Furthermore, Thunderbird 78.3 improves the Account Setup wizard to show a popup when you’re connected to a mail server with a self-signed SSL/TLS certificate, improves the Calendar’s sidebar UI, and moves the Reply-To header in the compose window.

Improvements were also made around the dragging and dropping of recipient pills, compatibility of spellcheck suggestions with the dark theme, as well as the rendering of the user interface on Linux distributions when the application was built without the updater.

A bunch of security vulnerabilities were fixed as well in Mozilla Thunderbird 78.3, which you can download right now from the official website. The latest version is 78.3.1, which includes a fix for a crash that occurred when updating to version 78.3.0 from a previous release.

Last updated 3 years ago

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