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More than a month and a half after the release of Thunderbird 102, the development team behind the popular Mozilla Thunderbird open-source email, news, calendar, and chat client opened the upgrade path from the previous stable series, Thunderbird 91.
Apart from Thunderbird 102, which is currently the latest stable series of the open-source email client, the Mozilla Thunderbird developers are also maintaining the Thunderbird 91 series, which is an ESR (Extended Support Release) branch.
Both branches are currently maintained, but, as with previous releases, there wasn’t possible to upgrade from the previous one to the latest stable version using the built-in upgrader. To be more precise, Thunderbird 102 was only offered as a direct download and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird 91 or earlier.
Until today, as now Thunderbird 91 users can finally upgrade to Thunderbird 102. To be more accurate, if you’re running Thunderbird 91.12.0, open the About Thunderbird dialog from the Help menu or by clicking on the small (i) icon next to the version number in the main window and upgrade to Thunderbird 102.1.2.
Why upgrade to Thunderbird 102? Because you’ll enjoy many great new features like a new address book that supports importing of contacts in the vCard format, a brand-new import/export wizard, out-of-the-box support for the popular Matrix decentralized chat protocol, the redesigned message header, Link Preview Cards, and much more.
Of course, this applies to Thunderbird users who run the email client using the official binary downloaded from thunderbird.net. If you have Thunderbird installed from your distro’s software repositories or from Flathub, you will have to wait for the latest version to arrive there before upgrading your installation.
The Mozilla Thunderbird devs revealed plans to take ownership of the Flatpak distribution of Thunderbird to provide users with an up-to-date version, as well as to offer beta options for early adopters.
Last updated 2 years ago
