Hello again Thunderbird Community! The last few months have involved a lot of learning for me, but I have a much better appreciation (and appetite!) for the variety of challenges and opportunities ahead for our team and the broader developer community. Catch up with last month’s update, and here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening across the different teams:
Exchange Web Services support in Rust
An important member of our team left recently and while we’ll very much miss the spirit and leadership, we all learned a lot and are in a good position to carry the project forwards. We’ve managed to unstick a few pieces of the backlog and have a few sprints left to complete work on move/copy operations, protocol logging and priority two operations (flagging messages, folder rename & delete, etc). New team members have moved past the most painful stages and have patches that have landed. Kudos to the patient mentors involved in this process!
QR Code Cross-Device Account Import
Thunderbird for Android launched this week, and the desktop client (Daily, Beta & ESR 128.4.0) now provides a simple and secure account transfer mechanism, so that account settings don’t have to be re-entered for new users of the mobile app. Download Thunderbird for Android from the Play store
Account Hub
Development of a refreshed account hub is moving forward apace and with the critical path broken down into sprints, our entire front end team is working to complete things in the next two weeks. Meta bug & progress tracking.
Clean up on aisle 2
In addition to our project work, we’ve had to be fairly nimble this month, with a number of upstream changes breaking our builds and pipelines. We get a ton of benefit from the platforms we inherit but at times it feels like we’re dealing with many things out of our control. Mental note: stay calm and focus on future improvements!
Global Database, Conversation View & folder corruption issues
On top of the conversation view feature and core refactoring to tackle the inner workings of thread-safe folder and message manipulation, work to implement a long term database replacement is well underway. Preliminary patches are regularly pumped into the development ecosystem for discussion and review, for which we’re very excited!
In-App Notifications
With phase 1 of this project now complete, we’ve scoped out additions that will make it even more flexible and suitable for a variety of purposes. Beta users will likely see the first notifications coming in November, so keep your eyes peeled. Meta Bug & progress tracking.
New Features Landing Soon
Several requested features are expected to debut this month (or very soon) and include…
- Dark Reader support
- RSS feed corrections
- Button inside link resolution
- PGP Key window adjustment
- Folder compaction fixes
- Lazy loading stack to improve performance
- Various calendar improvements
- startup crash avoidance
- and many more which are listed in release notes for beta.
As usual, if you want to see things as they land, and help us squash some early bugs, you can always check the pushlog and try running daily, which would be immensely helpful for catching things early.
See you next month.
Toby Pilling
Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering
The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: October 2024 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.