16
Jun 14

Only 5 Weeks Until Thunderbird 31 – Testing Needed

Thunderbird and Lightning do major releases about every 42 weeks and by now there are only 5 weeks left until Thunderbird 31 will be released. Your matching calendaring extension version is Lightning 3.3. Betas for both products are available and now its up to you: we need all the manpower we can get to make sure there are no regressions and everything still works as expected. Over a million active daily users will thank you for this!

To get started, download the beta builds and follow the standard installation procedure.

Although I doubt there will be any issues, its always a good idea to back up your profile. I myself have been using each of the beta builds and haven’t run into any dataloss issues.

Here is a list of areas that have changed and you should especially look into:

  • The access method for Preferences has changed, test everything that looks like we might need to store options for.
  • Make sure disabled UI elements are only disabled if they should be.
  • Some theme changes have been made, also in Thunderbird. Lightning may look different, but if its odd or out of place let us know.
  • Cool new feature: There are new ways to navigate in the today pane.
  • A number of changes in the area of scheduling. Please make sure sending, receiving, accepting, declining and reopening invitations still works as expected.
  • There were changes to the autocompletion feature used in the attendees dialog.
  • Remote CalDAV calendars, especially in combination with Google Calendar.

There is one known issue if you use a localized version of Thunderbird and Lightning. Certain locales have not been fully translated, but are included in the beta builds nevertheless. We will fix this issue for the second beta build soon.

If you notice any issues please leave a comment here as soon as possible. The more time we have to fix the issue the better. If you have a bugzilla account (or don’t mind creating one for free) please comment on an existing bug or file a new one if needed.