Instead of making a bunch of posts on these topics, I am grouping them together into one post. Some of these topics have answers to questions I’ve been getting recently, some are about observations I’ve made.
TB3.0b2
As you may know, Thunderbird 3.0b2 released a few days ago. I’m thrilled (but not as thrilled as I am for Postbox [I want that to support extensions. As soon as it does, I'll try to add ThunderBrowse compatibility]).
Some of the beta users of ThunderBrowse and users of 3.0b2 might have noticed that ThunderBrowse has had a difficult time phrasing the newer startpage urls (if you leave yours to the default).
It turns out I had forgotten to add a couple of strings that ThunderBrowse is supposed to swap out for %APP% and %OS%. My bad. The fix is to remove everything after the first ? (including the ? itself) in the startpage url. This will be definitely fixed in 3.2.4. EDIT: this has been fixed
You may have also noticed the find bar doesn’t work. Moz Co disabled the bar and made it so only things shown in the “mail” tab will be searchable. I’ve complained already but I’m not sure where it’s going to go from here.
AMO
AMO recently updated how they serve extensions. The new method is trickier because you don’t get a direct link to the extension (thus undermining one of the best things about ThunderBrowse). This makes it so you get a download window rather than an install prompt. There’s currently a bug filed on the ThunderBrowse project. Hopefully this can be resolved soon. EDIT: this has been fixed.
Cookies
There’s a bug caused by Thunderbird in which Thunderbird strips https cookies from response headers. This means that there is a bug that makes it difficult to login to sites that serve cookies over https. There’s currently a bug filed for Thunderbird at Bugzilla (bug #477120).
Uninstalling
This is another issue I still get messages about (it’s an uncommon occurrence); a few users have been unable to uninstall ThunderBrowse. A general note: this is not an issue caused by ThunderBrowse. ThunderBrowse is not spyware. You can confirm with VirusTotal and Softpedia.
Here’s some background to the issue. When a user uninstalls an extension, Thunderbird flags the extension for uninstall and then exits. When Thunderbird restarts, it checks the extension logs to see if anything has been newly installed, updated or uninstalled and then proceeds to work on that task.
This process works great as long as locked files, file corruption and operating system caching do not exist. But they do, so it’s possible that an user can be stuck not being able to uninstall. This causes Thunderbird to have issues on startup because some files were edited while others may not have been.
To fix this: Close down Thunderbird (make sure ThunderBrowse is still marked for uninstall). Next go to your profile folder. Delete the following files:
- xpti.dat
- compreg.dat
- extensions.ini
- extensions.cache
- extensions.rdf
Once that is done, restart Thunderbird. If ThunderBrowse is still there, something is locking the extension directory (or you have a corrupted profile). At this point, you can manually delete all the files in the ThunderBrowse extension folder (I suggest you back up first if you fear you have a corrupted profile [try KLS Mail Backup]) and then delete the files above. After a restart, ThunderBrowse should be completely gone.
These steps can also apply to other Thunderbird extensions as well.
Updates
Thought I would never get here. I’ve just updated Copy Link Name for Thunderbird and TB Properties for TB3.0b2 support. The new versions should release sometime soon.