New in Thunderbird 78

This article describes some of the major changes visible to users in Thunderbird version 78. Full details of all the changes can be found in the Thunderbird release notes from 78.0 and up.

Dark mode

There is now a dark mode in Thunderbird, making late-night email easier on the eyes. To enable, Thunderbird will use your operating system settings to see if you have enabled dark mode OS-wide.

Account Setup & Account Central Updated

The Account Setup window and the Account Central tab have both been updated. The Account Central tab appears when you do not have an account setup, or when you select an existing account in the folder tree.

The layout and dialogues have been improved to make it easier to understand the information displayed and to find relevant settings. The Account Central tab also has new information about the Thunderbird project and displays the version you are using.

Redesigned Compose Window

The compose window has been reworked to make composing a message faster, easier and more straightforward. The compose window now also takes up less space with recipients listed in “pills” instead of an entire line for each address.

The redesigned compose window makes it easier to manage many email recipients, and the new intuitive layout helps users to discover its features.

End-to-End Encrypted Email Support

End-to-end encryption for email can be used to ensure that only the sender and the recipients of a message can read the contents. Without this protection it is easy for email providers and mass surveillance to read your messages. If you would like to learn more about how end-to-end encryption in Thunderbird works, check out our article: Introduction to End-to-end encryption in Thunderbird.

Other Notable Changes

There are many other big changes that make Thunderbird 78 a very large release including: calendar and tasks are now integrated into Thunderbird, folder icons are now updated and their colors are customizable, the preferences are now searchable, and minimize to tray is now supported on Windows.

You can see details of all our changes in the release notes for Thunderbird 78.0 and up.

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