Mozilla injects Rust into Thunderbird to boost performance

4 months ago 46

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Mozilla has announced the release of Thunderbird 128, codenamed Nebula, which introduces significant improvements to the popular email client’s codebase, stability, and overall user experience. The most notable change is the integration of Rust, a modern programming language originally created by Mozilla Research, into Thunderbird’s core.

This integration marks a major leap forward for the open-source email client, as it promises to enhance code quality and performance. The Thunderbird team states that this overhaul will allow them to share features between desktop and future mobile versions of Thunderbird, as well as accelerate the development process.

“We’ve devoted significant development time integrating Rust into Thunderbird,” the team explains. “Even though this is a seemingly invisible change, it is a major leap forward because it enhances our code quality and performance.”

Beyond the Rust integration, Thunderbird 128 brings several user-facing improvements. The Cards View, which debuted in the previous “Supernova” release, has been refined for better readability and information scanning. The Folder Pane now boasts faster rendering and searching of unified folders, improved recall of message thread states, and multi-folder selection.

Other notable enhancements include:

Improved theme compatibility, especially beneficial for Linux users on Ubuntu and Mint
Account colour customisation
Streamlined menu navigation
Fully functional native Windows notifications
Reorganised context menu with primary actions displayed as icons

While not included in the initial release, the Thunderbird team plans to launch the first phase of built-in support for Exchange and Mozilla Sync in a future point release. Advanced users can test an experimental implementation of Exchange support for mail by enabling a hidden preference.

Thunderbird 128 is currently available as a direct download from thunderbird.net for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Automatic updates from earlier versions will be enabled once the team is confident no major issues exist after public testing.

As Thunderbird continues to evolve, this Rust integration represents a significant step towards improved performance and cross-platform compatibility.

(Image Credit: Mozilla)

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Tags: coding, languages, mozilla, programming, rust, thunderbird