Upon reading through this bug I discovered there are major flaws in the tab behavior on Thunderbird. The biggest being every time you switch away from a tab and then switch back, Thunderbird ‘reloads’ the tab’s contents. So lets say you have an email you want to view in a separate tab. Now, let’s say this is a rather long email and while you are reading this email another message comes in. You are midway through reading the email and you switch over to your Inbox in another tab. After you are done with the new message in your Inbox, you switch back to the email you were reading. In theory, you would think you be able to continue reading the message from where you left off. Nope, when you switch back to that tab, Thunderbird ‘reloads’ the tab and you are taken back to the beginning of the message. When you switch between tabs in Firefox, it remembers where you were in tab.

The only work around (if you even want to call it that) to this would be to open the message in a new Window. But then that kinda defeats the purpose of having tabs, now doesn’t it? Also, while reading this bug I realized that I never really noticed (or paid attention to) that when you compose a new or reply to a message, a new Window is opened instead of tab. That seems rather silly given this would be a perfect place to use tabs. Interestingly enough, ‘Compose in a Tab’ is one of the items on the newly released Thunderbird Up For Grabs list.

However, there really seems to be no progress towards getting this issue fixed. There have multiple ‘duplicate bugs’ filed and closed, but no real progress towards getting this one fixed. I suppose because it would require a major re-write of the Thunderbird code to fix the broken tabs. I understand there is lack of funding (and even initiative) to improve/fix Thunderbird. This seems especially true when it comes to tabs, just look at the (broken/incomplete) Tabs on Top that launched with Thunderbird 11 in March this year. Yet Mozilla is throwing tons of resources at adding Instant Messaging and BigFiles (attach from Cloud) capabilities to Thunderbird. While the BigFiles feature is a great idea as a way to get around ISPs’ attachment limit by allowing you to upload your attachments to a cloud server, it has been viewed by many as ‘security risk’.

Instant Messaging, is just an odd direction to go. I would have never thought of using Thunderbird as an instant messaging client (nor would I want to). I really think this should be standalone application like Sunbird (Mozilla’s standalone Calendar application). May be they are wanting to resurrect the old Netscape Communicator (a multi-functional ‘Internet Suite’ which include Email, Chat, News Groups, Calendar and more). While on the topic of calendars and Thunderbird, I beginning to wonder if we will ever see a fully integrated Calendar in Thunderbird. Don’t be mistaken by Lighting, it is an add-on that adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird. I am talking about having a native calendar built-in to Thunderbird that is not dependent on add-ons. Sadly, this is one area that Microsoft has and continues to have Mozilla beat.

I am monitoring this bug along with about 70+ other people. That is a rather significant number of people for bug, especially a Thunderbird bug.

The idea is really simple: there are plenty of features we would love to add to the Thunderbird roadmap but we badly lack the resources to complete them. So we decided to put them in an open repository, up for anyone to grab one and get it developed. In doing so, you will be working closely with the core Thunderbird team members who will support and guide you all along the way.

For more information and a list of projects ‘Up For Grabs’ see the Mozilla Wiki.

Source: The Thunderbird Blog

• Issues relating to new mail notifications and filtering on POP3 based accounts
• Occasional startup crash seen in TB 12.0
• Issue with corrupted message bodies when using movemail

Existing Thunderbird 12 users should be able to update via Help > About Thunderbird or may manually download and install Thunderbird 12.0.1 from here. A reminder, support for Thunderbird 3.1 has ended.

April 24th

• Thunderbird ESR 10.0.4
• Thunderbird 12.0.0

April 26th

• Thunderbird 13 Beta (13.0b1)*

April 27th

• Thunderbird 14 Earlybird (14.0a2)*

Coming Soon

June 5th

• Thunderbird ESR 10.0.5
• Thunderbird 13
• Thunderbird 14 Beta (14.0b1)*
• Thunderbird 15 Earlybird (15.0a2)*

Future Releases

July 17th

• Thunderbird ESR 10.0.6
• Thunderbird 14
• Thunderbird 15 Beta (15.0b1)*
• Thunderbird 16 Earlybird (16.0a2)*

* As part of the new Rapid Release Schedule,dates listed for Earlybird and Beta builds reflect when the code merge is set to begin. The actual release to that particular channel may vary by several days. See the Wiki for more details.

Planned Release Dates (subject to change):

• Thunderbird 13: June 5th, 2012
• Thunderbird 14: July 17th, 2012

Just Released

None

Coming Soon

April 24th

• Thunderbird ESR 10.0.4
• Thunderbird 12.0.0
• Thunderbird 13 Beta (12.0b1)*
• Thunderbird 14 Earlybird (13.0a2)*

Future Releases

June 5th

• Thunderbird ESR 10.0.5
• Thunderbird 13 Final
• Thunderbird 14 Beta (14.0b1)*
• Thunderbird 15 Earlybird (15.0a2)*

* As part of the new Rapid Release Schedule,dates listed for Earlybird and Beta builds reflect when the code merge is set to begin. The actual release to that particular channel may vary by several days. See the Wiki for more details.

• bug 733731 – Fixes an issue that may cause hangs when handling IMAP mail
• bug 735940 – Fixes an issue that may cause filters that move mail to specific folders to be erronously (sic) changed

I had not run into issues with the first bug, but had heard from users who were affected. The second bug, I had run into on the laptop, especially when Thunderbird was trying to re-sync my IMAP accounts upon resuming Windows from hibernate mode. There were a couple times I had to force Thunderbird to close and then restart.

Existing Thunderbird 11.0.x users can update by going to Help > About Thunderbird. The next schedule update is Thunderbird 12.0 on April 24th.