After the update to 136, both the bidi mail UI (bidirectional support for Arabic and Hebrew) and the Provider for Google Calendar have been automatically disabled, since the new TB doesn’t support them.
Thunderbird 136 has become useless.
I wish somebody had tested TB 136 before release.
Is there any way to fix this? Or is there only one option: downgrade?
Also, perhaps it would be better to withhold such experimental releases - after all, this affects a total population of about half a billion people, probably more (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, i.e. Semitic languages).
This isn’t an experimental release, it is the stable release from Mozilla and is the official release from Arch. If you want the functionality of the former version, the esr ( thunderbird-esr-bin 128.8.0-1) version is available from the AUR.
Typically, addons may need to be updated after a major update of Thunderbird. Sometimes they are not updated in a timely fashion. Sometimes they are not updated at all, and alternatives must be found, or the addon must be abandoned completely.
I should remind you that addon compatibility is governed by Thunderbird and not Manjaro (or Arch) as only supported addons are provided via the official repositories.
There is nothing to be fixed. Your addon preferences are not the responibility of Manaro (or Arch).
However (as @jrichard326 suggests) a workaround might be to build thunderbird-esr-bin (128.8.0-1) via the AUR.
A general warning that there will also come a time when this workaround will no longer be a viable option. It may well be prudent to search for a potential replacement:
Then complain to the developers of the add-ons. It’s not the responsibility of Mozilla to be sure all add-ons work before releasing a major upgrade to Thunderbird. It is the responsibility of add-on developers to be sure they are compatible with the latest version of Thunderbird.
You’re going to have to get used to add-ons occasionally not working with new versions of Thunderbird if you use the default release rather than the ESR version:
However, that still isn’t an excuse for add-on developers to be lazy. There is a Thunderbird beta release channel which add-on developers should be using (especially those who maintain very popular add-ons).
As of today, the beta version available is v137.0b1-SSL, according to what Firefox displays when I hover over the TB download button:
@jrichard326
Wish thunderbird-esr could be promoted from aur to manjaro extra, in the same way in which both libreoffice fresh and libreoffice still are maintained. Betterbird might be an even better option.
@ben75
As a matter of fact, the thunderbird development model is (was?) not very helpful. Possibly, with the new release policy this will improve, but the transition could have been managed better. Obviously add on developers did not want to update their addon for every single beta and in the past it was not clear at all what beta would have become an official release and what it would have broken. The add-on verification lag before new versions of the add on can become available adds to this. The fact that almost every single add on broke with tb 136 (in my case I remained with jut 20% of the add-ons I had) should be enough evidence for this. Since at this point the strong add-on ecosystem is probably the strongest selling point of thunderbird, the situation is a bit unfortunate.
@jrichard326
Now, unfortunately, there might be a problem in going back to esr. To the best of my understanding, thunderbird makes no promise about the compatibility of the profile. This means that the profile updated by thunderbird 136 could be troublesome with thunderbird 128esr, so to go back you need to start from a fresh profile that takes ages to be customized to what you need.
libreoffice-fresh and libreoffice-still are packaged by Arch, not Manjaro. So, if the powers-that-be at Arch decide thunderbird-esr should be included in the Arch repos, then that change will automatically roll across to Manjaro’s repos.
Is it not that manjaro alone might choose to do it in the name of the better stability guarantees that it often gives over arch? There are already some packages that are aur for arch and promoted for manjaro (don’t want to push with this msg, just asking).
The add-on developer of the bidi mail gui was everything but lazy! He had uploaded an update but it hadn’t yet been released by Mozilla.
That specific add-on has now been updated and is working again.
While Firefox supports RTL (right-to-left) languages, TB does not. Both are maintained by Mozilla. The developer of the bidi mail ui add-on has an interesting Readme on github.
I’m a strong proponent of open source software, but under these circumstances there is no way I would support TB for university use, or actually any use except perhaps private use.
however, the general public doesn’t seem to have caught up.
I still see “Mozilla Thunderbird” in print, and even in some repositories, despite Thunderbird now being a separate entity from Mozilla.
Addons (for Thunderbird and Firefox) are generally developed by third parties; and those third parties are often slow in bringing their addons to market in a timely fashion. That’s often the fault of the individual developer.
I believe your argument is misplaced; It’s like blaming your car manufacturer for an after-market hub cap that fell off.
Topic title has been changed to better fit reality.
