Normally I do not experience issues with Mozilla and their redesigns. Of course, I haven’t used Firefox in years as it became too bloated. I had a family member who ran Pale Moon for that exact reason. I have stuck with Mozilla Thunderbird throughout the years as it has been a good desktop email client. However, this morning I booted up and noticed my Thunderbird icon on the taskbar was different and then when it launched it was way different. My use of Mozilla Thunderbird is to be able to have four Gmail accounts accessible in one centralized location and to interact with my Google Calendar. The first thing I notice was I having a heck of time just reading what was in my inbox as the font size had been radically decreased. Also the layout was funky as there suddenly seemed to be a lot of wasted space and gianorums search box (which I removed without issue). Everything seemed fine until….
A couple hours into my morning I am doing my usual routine, going through my feeds, watching/listening to YouTube videos, etc. when suddenly Windows froze then crashed. I was able to CTRL+ALT+DELETE my way out of that and fortunately wasn’t working on anything at the time. Thought it was odd having had this HP Omen PC for 3+ years now and never had issues. May be it is that USB hub I bought on Amazon. No can’t be, been using the hub for two-weeks now without issues. Whenever I leave my PC for extended periods of time (meals, running errands, etc.) I put the computer to sleep. I do ‘shut down’ at bedtime and about once a week (or when updates require) I’ll preform a restart then shutdown. This afternoon I put the computer to sleep, did some yoga, took a shower and then ate dinner. After dinner I went to wake up my computer and it would not fully wake up. All the lights were on, but I had no display and my keyboard and mouse would not work. Even pressing the power button which is set to ‘sleep’ wouldn’t wake up the PC. At this point I figured I’d would have to do a hard restart (holding the button for 5-seconds). Again, nothing was being worked on that was unsaved so no risk of loosing anything. I held the power button in for 5-seconds and then the PC restarted, but then took me back to my session as it was prior to putting the computer to sleep (almost as if it was hibernating).
At this point, I knew nothing else had changed on this PC and it was not the USB hub from two-weeks ago as that would have given me issues from day 1 (if there were any). So I knew it has to be Thunderbird 115 aka Supernova causing my issues. Did a Google Search and ended up in the r/Thunderbird subreddit. First was a thread complaining about the new UI and deep in the comments there was something from a Thunderbird Dev about using Calendar with repeating events causing Supernova to freeze. After a little more searching I found a thread on how to correctly downgrade Supernova (Thunderbird 115 back to 102) as well as how to ‘administratively disable’ it from trying to update itself to Supernova (115) again. No, you can not simply delete Supernova and reinstall the prior version (102.15) on top of it.
via Reddit /r/Thunderbird: How to downgrade from Thunderbird 115 to 102 (the previous version before “Supernova” redesign)
Notes:
- If you perform Step 1e (delete or rename the compatibility.ini file in your profile folder) in the directions then you can just launch Thunderbird normally (without the –allow-downgrade switch) in Step 4.
- Directions on how to disable further updates are at the end of the reddit post and if done correctly your About Mozilla Thunderbird screen should be similar to above.
