Thunderbird 60 and 68 Support

I’ve been receiving many e-mails and 1 star reviews lately related to support for Thunderbird 60 and 68. As you may know, Firefox completely removed “legacy” add-on support and transitioned to WebExtensions. Once this support was gone, they started making changes that previously would’ve been incompatible with add-ons. Since Thunderbird is built off the same code, it is pulling in these incompatible changes and breaking existing add-ons.

gContactSync relied on many of the interfaces that changed, causing it to break in various ways starting with Thunderbird 57 and ramping up very quickly with each beta after Thunderbird 60. Due to having a full-time job and a personal life it was difficult to keep up, so support fell behind. I also fell behind on responding to e-mails and forum posts. Try to understand this is an unpaid project in my spare time before sending an angry e-mail. I respond more frequently to polite e-mails than to negative ones, so it’s in your best interest to remain civil :).

There wasn’t much documentation at the time about updating for TB 68, so I converted gContactSync to a legacy MailExtension and removed support for versions of Thunderbird prior to 65 beta with instructions on the add-on page to use an older version of gContactSync with TB 60 or earlier. I didn’t realize this would break so many people using TB 60.

For now I will maintain two “branches” of gContactSync. The Thunderbird wiki doesn’t fully explain how this will work, so be prepared to dig into the Versions page on ATN (addons.thunderbird.net) for the latest version that supports your version of Thunderbird. I realize it is inconvenient, but supporting TB 60 and 68 in the same add-on package would be very time consuming for me and is throwaway work that will be obsolete as soon as 68 is released.

• 2.1.x supports Thunderbird up to and including version 60.
• 3.x supports Thunderbird 67 beta through 68

The Thunderbird developers haven’t decided the fate of legacy add-ons in TB 69 or later yet, so I can’t say what will happen next.

The latest Thunderbird 68 nightly worked pretty well with version 3.1.6 (uploaded for review on June 1st, 2019), but I haven’t tested it exhaustively, and there is no guarantee something won’t break before Thunderbird 68 is fully released. Please write up bugs on the GitHub page as you find them. Please use the issue templates to make sure I get the information I need to recreate and fix the problem.

TL;DR Go the ATN Versions page and select the latest 2.1.x version for TB 60 and use the latest 3.x version for TB 67 beta and TB 68.