2011

Thunderbird 3.1 Support Ending April 2012?

As mentioned today on our Firefox Blog, support for Firefox 3.6 will be likely ending in late April 2012. However, the Enterprise/Thunderbird/ExtendedSupport has not been refined yet. It still states, We intend to conclude on this subject within two weeks in order to be able to offer Thunderbird ESR 1.0 at the same time that Thunderbird 8 or 9 is released. Thunderbird 3.1 will be declared end-of-life 12 weeks after the release of Thunderbird ESR 1.0. Given that Firefox (though not yet official) has decided to make Firefox 10 the first ESR, it would seem logical that Thunderbird would follow…

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Firefox 3.6 Support Ends April 2012

Some new developments since the Firefox 3.6 Support Ending Early 2012 article was posted last month. The Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal has been more refined now. If the assumption that the first Firefox ESR is going to be based of off Firefox 10 (release date January 31st, 2012) then allowing for a 12-week ‘grace period’ would put the end date of Firefox 3.6 support on April 24th, 2012 (also the date Firefox 12 will be released). This also 13-months after the release (March 21, 2011) of Firefox 4, twice the support time of the standard 6-month after release of next major version time…

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Revision to Starting with a Fresh Profile

Bad_Attitude commented about the Starting with a Fresh Profile post. They mentioned that they move their Greasemonkey and Stylish scripts as well. I am not really certain what percentage of Firefox users use Greasemonkey and/or Stylish scripts and didn’t even think about porting those over. I do use many Greasemonkey scripts and may be one or two Stylish scripts. So, I’ve added directions on how to move over your Greasemonkey and/or Stylish scripts. In the Starting Over section I’ve added a new step which involved installing and using the eCleaner add-on prior to installing new add-ons. Since users are porting…

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Thunderbird Win x86 64-Bit Builds

Much like Firefox, there are some unofficial 64-Bit builds for Thunderbird. They can be found here. However, at this time the most latest version is Thunderbird 7.0.0 (release is 8.0.0). As with any other developmental build, use at your own risk and ideally with a separate profile (this where ProfileMaanger can come in handy). Thanks to Bob Slim for the tip.

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omni.jar to become omni.ja

Bug 701875 was created a few days ago to address a major issue with Windows and Gecko 2.0 (Firefox 4.0+/Thunderbird 5.0+). omni.jar is a core file for Gecko 2.0 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. From MDN: Firefox 4 and Thunderbird 3.3 achieve performance improvements by moving many of their internal parts from being standalone files or sets of JAR files into just one JAR file called omni.jar; this reduces the amount of I/O needed to load the application. This issue is no fault of Mozilla’s rather Microsoft Windows. It seems the Window’s System Restore does not backup .jar files. Trying…

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Thunderbird 9.0 Beta 1 Released

Mozilla has completed the merge for Thunderbird 9 on the Beta release channel on November 16, 2011. The latest version of Thunderbird Beta has the following changes: Added an opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Thunderbird Better keyboard handling for attachments Windows users can hide the menu bar (and show it with the “alt” key) Several user interface fixes and improvements and numerous other platform fixes Please see the complete list of changes in this version. You can get Thunderbird 9 Beta (as well as Thunderbird 10 Earlybird) here. Lightning…

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omni.jar to become omni.ja

Bug 701875 was created a few days ago to address a major issue with Windows and Gecko 2.0 (Firefox 4.0+/Thunderbird 5.0+). omni.jar is a core file for Gecko 2.0 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. From MDN: Firefox 4 and Thunderbird 3.3 achieve performance improvements by moving many of their internal parts from being standalone files or sets of JAR files into just one JAR file called omni.jar; this reduces the amount of I/O needed to load the application. This issue is no fault of Mozilla’s rather Microsoft Windows. It seems the Window’s System Restore does not backup .jar files. Trying…

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Faster Firefox Updates

First off, by faster we do not mean frequency, but rather how fast the update installs on your machine. Ehsan Akhgari has posted an article on Future of Firefox, Updating Firefox in the Background. In this article, Ehsan explains how the current Firefox update process works and what is being done to improve this process. In order to update itself, Firefox first starts to download an update in the background. When the update is downloaded, Firefox stages it in a directory ready to be applied. The next time that Firefox is about to start up, it checks out the staging…

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Wiki Updates

Over the past couple days, we have gone through and updated the Wiki. The Extensions section has been updated for Firefox 7.0 and 8.0 compatibility and about a dozen new extensions that have already been discussed on the blog were added. The Firefox Tweaks section has also been updated for Firefox 7.0 and 8.0 compatibility. Also we have re-formatted the tweak pages, doing away with the color-code Firefox version compatibility and adding an updated date at the bottom of each page. Now each tweak will show Works with: followed by the version number. Old Compatibility Listing Design Firefox 3.6: YES     …

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