Thunderbird’s “Supernova” Release Promises Revamped Calendar UI, Firefox Sync Support

Thunderbird's "Supernova"

After promising a debut on Android mobile devices thanks to the joint collaboration with the K-9 Mail email client, the Thunderbird project is now teasing us with its upcoming “Supernova” release, due out in 2023, as Thunderbird’s biggest release in years.

Thunderbird’s “Supernova” release will offer us a modern interface of the open-source email, calendar, chat, and news client that introduces a revamped Calendar UI with support for defining what your weekend is and visually collapse weekends to save space, fully customizable and more accessible toolbar, and redesigned search.

As you can see from the mockup above, the Calendar’s event search feature will now be shown at a glance on the right side of the window, in a side pane, so you can more easily find future events and increase your productivity. The search view will also display keyboard shortcut hints for even faster access.

The new visual customization options for the Calendar component will be accessible via a popup menu to allow you to show/hide calendar colors and icons, swap calendar colors with the category colors, collapse weekends, or completely remove weekend days.

Also revamped will be the Event view, which promises to display important information like event location, event attendees, or the even organizer at a glance, along with the ability to easily identify and sort the list of attendees by their current RSVP (répondez s’il vous plaît – please reply) status.

“By default, getting to this event preview screen requires only 1 click. And it’s 2 clicks to open the edit view,” explained the devs in a blog post. “Because you love customization, you can control the click behavior. Do you want to skip the event preview screen and open the edit screen with just 1 click? We’ll have an option for that in preferences.

In addition to the revamped Calendar UI, Thunderbird’s “Supernova” release also promises a long-anticipated feature that lets you synchronize your email accounts, calendars, address book, and list of installed add-ons across multiple Thunderbird installations.

Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about Firefox Sync, which will be implemented as a cloud syncing capability for Thunderbird users to make it easier for them to set up a new Thunderbird installation on another machine or repair a corrupted local profile via a new “restart from a clean slate” workflow.

Thunderbird’s “Supernova” release is expected sometime in 2023, but a release date is not yet set in stone. It would appear that these new features will be available as part of the Thunderbird 115 version, which should be out around July 2023.

Image credits: Thunderbird

Last updated 1 year ago

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