Mozilla plans to ship Lightning add-on with Thunderbird 38 email client

Thunderbird is the main email client that I use on all desktop systems. There are plenty of reasons for that, from full control over all emails to better privacy and options to load add-ons that improve the functionality of the client.

One of the most popular add-ons for Thunderbird is the calendar extension Lightning. Thunderbird itself does not ship with a calendar of its own while email clients such as Microsoft's Outlook do ship with one.

Lightning is regularly updated and there have been talks in the past to integrate it natively in the email client. The original plan was to integrate the calendar in Thunderbird  3 and then later on in Thunderbird 8 but the decision was overturned each time.

The integration never happened and the reasons given at the time were that Mozilla did not have enough resources to maintain the email client and Thunderbird, and that it was not well performing.

It appears that the community development team made the decision to ship the Lightning add-on with Mozilla Thunderbird 38 which will be released on March 19th, 2015.

The core reason for the change of heart was Mozilla's decision to hand over development of the email client to the community, that modern email clients are expected to support a calendar, and that efforts are underway to make it easier to match Lightning to specific versions of the Thunderbird client.

So how will it be integrated?

The plan is to ship Thunderbird 38 with the Lightning extension. As it stands now, Lightning will not be enabled on systems where it has not been installed before. The reason for this is that it may impact the performance on systems if activated and that it does not make sense to enable it on systems where it is not being used yet.

Nothing will change for users who are using the Lightning extension already.

Note that it is possible for the plan to be overturned in the future or that changes are implemented. This article will be updated when that happens so that you are always in the know in this regard.