Mozilla Thunderbird desktop email client to receive a major design overhaul this year

Mozilla’s Thunderbird desktop email client is confirmed to undergo a major cosmetic overhaul. The company is also working towards improving support for Gmail. Thunderbird happens to be among the popular free, open-source and cross-platform email clients developed by Mozilla.

Mozilla said it has received feedback asking for UX/UI improvements and it will work on improving UI/UX of Thunderbird in 2019. With the addition of new developers, Mozilla aims at improving the experience for their users across the board in Thunderbird.

One area of usability Mozilla is planning on addressing this year has to be integration improvements in areas like better Gmail support. Mozilla also said it is looking to address Gmail label support and ensure that other features pertaining to Gmail experience translate well into Thunderbird.

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Mozilla said it has hired an engineer whose primary focus will remain on security and privacy. Mozilla confirmed the UX/UI around encryption and settings will get an overhaul in the coming year. However, Mozilla did not confirm whether or not all this will come into effect in the next release itself.

In addition to a mail client, Thunderbird also provides users with news client, RSS and chat client services. Both Firefox web browser and Thunderbird mail client are pre-installed on Ubuntu desktop systems.

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This is what Ryan Sipes, Community Manager, Mozilla Thunderbird had this to say:

“We still have some areas to improve on this year, with one of them being onboarding core contributors. Thunderbird is a big, complex project that isn’t easy to jump into. So, as we closed out the year I opened a bug where we can detail what documentation needs to be created or updated for new members of the community – to ensure they can dive into the project.”