TBZoom will be fading out soon. With it, I will also be removing TB Properties. And before you grab onto your nearest email client to write to me, hear me out first.

Though don’t freak out when you hear me say “removed” in this post*, I mean it will no longer appear on the download page on ThunderBrowse.com. You can still download it here, but I offer no support for it.

TBZoom

TBZoom did a great job. It was supposed to allow the zoom manager from TB2 work for ThunderBrowse tabs, and it did so perfectly.

However, in 3.2.8, I added support for the TB3 zoom manager (in TB3 tabs). Because of this, TBZoom really isn’t needed as much as it was before. This doesn’t mean I’ll be removing it completely, it does mean that I will be removing it from update cycles. TBZoom will not be updated anymore because it doesn’t really need to be. It’s legacy software for Thunderbird 1.5-2.0.

TB Properties

* This one will completely die.

Now, with that aside, I will be stopping TB Properties support, remove it from AMO, delete its entry from the download page here and leave it only downloadable via the GS! Networks Project page. Why? Because MOST of the software on that page is BETA\ALPHA\EXPERIMENTAL.

I also don’t use TB Properties. And it’s more likely that if I’m not using it, I probably won’t be updating it. Several people have informed me that it broke their context menus on Thunderbird 3 when they tried to use it. Do note, that TB Properties is not supported for Thunderbird 3, and I take no responsibility for the fact some of you modified the code and the software stopped working. TB Properties had a moderate run, but it’s really just a sloppy hack.

TBExtInt

In addition, I will not be supporting TBExtInt. You might have realized this already. I’m going to make this official by saying that TBExtInt will not be further developed. It too was a rush job and does not reflect the quality of software that I normally strive for. It was an experiment and it’s results were mixed. I wished for better but I didn’t get what I thought I would.

In the end, TBExtInt became more of a burden than a solution. I learned a bit from it, I’m glad I didn’t spend a lot of work on it.

TB Noscript

A side note on Noscript, as I mentioned when I first wrote it, I won’t be continuing it. It was for fun to play around with some settings. By no means did I mean to make it a legitimate product. It was a small side project. As such, I was surprised when a lot of people downloaded it. I really wish that the real NoScript worked in Thunderbird, but I doubt that will ever happen.

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.

TB Properties is now at version 0.7 and has Ukranian locale support.

Copy Link Name for Thunderbird is also at version 0.7 and features 10 new locales:

Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, German, Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian (Cyrillic), Slovak, Spanish (Spain), Turkish, Ukrainian