Hey,
My thunderbird client(s) just got updated to version 115, with the new UI. Personally, I dislike it, and find it disruptive to have all my toolbars moved.
Does anyone know if there’s a way to revert to the old, pre ver 115 appearance?
Thanks, – Pat
You can revert everything they have changed. Depends on what you want to change, however.
You can redesign toolbars to however you want them to be from View > Toolbars. You can revert to the message list (the main area with messages) by displaying a message list header with View > Layouts > Message list header and opening the Message list display options at the top right of the message list header and selecting the list view.
Similarly, there are toggles for everything else. Just keep clicking until you get the desired look. Try searching on the internet when you do not know where to find some option.
Can you switch the order of the toolbars, by any chance? Put the menu bar on the top again, followed by the tab bar, then the message toolbar ?
Answered my own question. Yes, and here’s how:
I hate the top bar, it just takes up space
Betterbird maybe? I don’t really use Thunderbird much so not 100% sure what it had before. 😁
Betterbird is updated as well now.
On the other side, is it possible to upgrade to the newer UI?
What version do you use? Flatpak took forever but has it for a long time now. Their binary of course, but who wants that.
Or get an Arch distrobox and use that, or whatever. Maybe your system repos? Are you on Debian or something?
I’m just using the default provided binary for windows 🤷
You need to update manually for some reason. The exe from their website
Alright, thanks for the info
You wont be able to revert everything, since 115 is essentially a new underlying UI framework. Your best bet is a fork like betterbird since you’ll be able to just load up your profile and keep going fairly seamlessly. But chances are rheyll eventually catch up to 115, and betterbird may diverge further or follow along.
Thunderbird 115 does have a decent amount of customization still. You can switch the list views from the new cards look back to the table layout, if that is your main dislike. It’s the icon at the top right of the inbox list next to the quick filters button. You can also change the layout to a horizontal one from the hamburger menu under views.
As far as tool bars there is not much you can do other than try to get as close to your preferred setup with the customize capabilities. Just right click on the top header area, just like in firefox. It wont have everything from older versions of Thunderbird, but most of the common tasks are available to use there instead of in the message veiwer or on the list/table view.
And of course, there may be some add-ons which restore some UI elements or features you miss. Many of those things would need to be re-implemented for the newer UI framework and would need enough people who use them to justify an add-on dev or the thunderbird team to make it happen.
Its fancy and all, but to this day a downgrade
- search filters where there before
- filters (for deleting or sorting) have only one level now? No if (a + b) or (c + d) anymore
- Thunderbird Conversations is broken, which is horrible
- stupid useless sidebar with no purpose but to open tabs? (Butter Robot meme here)
The rest is nice though.
- conversations working perfectly now for me, they fixed it
- hiding the left sidebar is literally one click at the bottom left corner, and it will never show up again. I don’t use it on my desktop, but on my lower resolution smaller laptop screen its useful, as it uses less screen space than tabs, I usually close all tabs there except one.
- I use some filters but maybe not as much as you, but for my use case I haven’t noticed a downgrade, search works and I can usually find what I want, or at least search hasn’t changed.
