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A Closer Look at Betterbird

Betterbird is a soft fork of Mozilla Thunderbird, designed to closely follow Thunderbird’s Extended

These series have all reached "end
AI-generated illustration. These series have all reached "end

Betterbird is a soft fork of Mozilla Thunderbird, designed to closely follow Thunderbird’s Extended You can actually install it alongside Thunderbird and run both simultaneously using the exact same user profile.

This client offers exclusive features you won't find in Thunderbird, like a multi-line message list and vertical tabs. The project is led by Jörg Knobloch, who served as Thunderbird's very first employee and release engineer. However, the official documentation doesn't explain how they plan to scale their build infrastructure beyond a few personal machines.

These series have all reached "end of life" status: 115: 4th February 2025 128: 14th September 2025 140: 18th August 2026. The project labels Thunderbird as Bananaware, asserting that its extended support releases frequently suffer from catastrophic bugs causing data loss. According to Betterbird, expanding the development team has actually led to a major increase in software regressions for Thunderbird. Users can officially obtain Betterbird for Windows, macOS on Intel or Apple Silicon, and Linux through several packaging formats. To run its infrastructure, the project depends on restricted personal equipment, specifically a single Windows system and two Mac Minis.

The claims regarding Thunderbird's quality issues and regression trends are presented from Betterbird's perspective and may be subject to disagreement or alternative interpretations by the official Thunderbird project.

Read the original reporting: https://www.betterbird.eu/

Sources

Verified claims

disputedBetterbird is a soft fork of Mozilla Thunderbird, designed to closely follow Thunderbird’s Extended Support Releases (ESR).
disputedThe project is led by Jörg Knobloch, who was Thunderbird's first employee and a former maintainer and release engineer from 2016 to 2019.
supportedBetterbird can be installed alongside Thunderbird and run simultaneously using the same user profile.
supportedBetterbird offers exclusive features not found in Thunderbird, such as a multi-line message list view, vertical tabs, and customizable account colors.
disputedThese series have all reached "end of life" status: 115: 4th February 2025 128: 14th September 2025 140: 18th August 2026.
disputedThe project describes Thunderbird as "Bananaware" and claims it has a history of disastrous ESR releases with data loss bugs in versions 102 and 128.
disputedBetterbird claims that the number of software regressions in Thunderbird has significantly grown as more developers have been hired.
supportedBetterbird is officially distributed for Windows (including a portable version), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Linux (via Arch User Repository, Flatpak, and AppImage).
disputedThe project's infrastructure relies on limited personal hardware, including one Windows build machine and two Mac Minis.

Stills

Betterbird claims that the number of
AI-generated. Betterbird claims that the number of

Original reporting: https://www.betterbird.eu/

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