Thunderbird 136.0 is out! The First Release in New Monthly Channel

Mozilla announced the new 136.0 release of its Thunderbird email client on Tuesday! It’s NOT ESR, but desktop release channel that updates every month!

As you may know, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has a rapid release channel that updates every 4 weeks, and ESR channel releases major updates every year. Now, it uses the similar policy for Thunderbird!

Thunderbird 136.0 is the first release in the new official channel. And, there’ll be 137.0 in next month, 138.0 in May, and so forth.

According to the official release note, the new 136.0 release introduced a quick toggle in the header to switch between light and dark mode. Though I didn’t find it when trying it out in Ubuntu 24.04…

The release also added new “Appearance” settings page to control the default sorting order and threading options for newly created folders.

Other changes are mostly bug-fixes. It fixed crash when shutting down during MAPI send, delete or detach attachments failure in saved .eml file, “Save Link As” not working in feed web content, as well as:

Click addresses in the header could show popup off-screen in HiDPI screens.
Take long time opening an .EML file in profiles with many folders.
Poor performance resizing message panes with many folders.
Send to multiple SMTPs could fail silently due to miss address book.
UI font size change did not apply to some dialogs.
Deleted Gmail messages stayed visible until compact/expunge
Account settings menu could load twice.
Incorrect aligned context menu entries
Security fixes, and see more in the release note.

How to Install Thunderbird 136.0

Thunderbird 136.0 is available to download for Windows, Linux, and macOS in its website via the link below:

Download Thunderbird

For Linux, it’s so far a portable tarball. Just decompress and run the executable file from the extracted folder will launch the email client.

For Ubuntu users, the developer team will update the Snap package (runs in sandbox) which can be installed from either Ubuntu Software or App Center depends on your Ubuntu edition.