Thunderbird to flap twice as fast from September

Thunderbird is moving to fortnightly releases to keep pace with Firefox's accelerated schedule. Mozilla and its subsidiary MZLA updated their flagship apps this week, releasing Firefox 154 and Thunderbird 154, respectively. Since last month's version 153 releases are the latest Extended Support Releases, users who prefer a slower pace can remain on them for the next year. "ESR" is Mozilla's term for what Canonical calls LTS, Long Term Support. The new 154 versions are therefore short-term, or interim, releases. As we reported, the Mozilla Firefox release schedule speeds up from next month to new versions every two weeks, instead of every four weeks. According to a message from MZLA's Corey Bryant, Thunderbird will adopt the same cadence in September. Firefox picks up a few extras Firefox does get some new features, although most are of little interest to FOSS fans. Several of the additions are Windows-only for now, including the ability to give Firefox a custom app icon. Also reserved for those who like to pay for their OS, Firefox 154 now supports GeForce NOW. The Register covered its launch in 2018. It is a subscription service that lets users play supported games remotely, with the rendering handled by cloudy Nvidia hardware. Outside the Microsoft world, Mac users can now back up their Firefox profiles. The prompt-fondlers out there may enjoy playing with the new Smart Window, which lets you use artificial idiocy to interact with the browser. Sounds awful to us, as AI in general now does to more than half of Americans. Thunderbird brings the bigger payload This time, Thunderbird gets more new features - and, to this vulture's eye, more useful ones. Thunderbird 154 enables Microsoft Graph support for Microsoft 365, using the API that the company announced in 2015 to interact with Microsoft 362.5 services. The addition is timely because the Exchange Web Services API is on the way out for Redmond's cloud products. That makes Graph support a useful addition - although EWS will still work for outfits that host their own Exchange Servers. The release improves handling of messages encrypted with Cryptographic Message Syntax, along with drag-and-drop and context-menu copying of messages and attachments. Attachment previews have also been improved on macOS. Finally, on desktops with a system tray, Thunderbird can now be minimized to it when the last window is closed. This version also handles interrupted connections during large IMAP operations more gracefully - a significant improvement, since this issue has bitten this vulture before. If that sounds arcane, imagine knowing that you will soon lose an email account and you want to back up its contents first. Thunderbird makes this easy: create some local folders, or folders on another server, select everything, and drag and drop it. It's all fine until your internet connection falls over, which, as we all know, tends to happen at the worst possible moment. There are also more than 30 assorted bug fixes and more than 50 security fixes. This is, after all, an internet-facing app. We don't know who or when, but at some point, some damned fool thought: "Wouldn't it be great if you could format your emails in HTML?" The answer to this, of course, is: "NO! No, it would not! That is a terrible idea!" However, that ship has not merely sailed. It had an active service life of several decades before being towed away, broken for scrap, and turned into cutlery. As a result of this, you have a choice: either run an email client that has all the latest web security fixes, or do your email in the terminal and get used to telling people that you couldn't read their important missive. (R)