System tray support on Linux

[filipesaraiva]

Currently Thunderbird supports system tray on Windows - just close the software and an icon will be presented on Windows system tray.

Unfortunately this feature is missing on Linux. In past there were several plugins to do that, like several versions of Minimize-to-tray, however the plugin technology for Thunderbird (and Firefox) has changed over time, and these plugins are no longer supported.

Currently if I want to use this feature on Linux I need install an additional software like systray-x or KDocker, which it is weird.

So, please turn this feature native for Linux too!

[CyberSimon]

Just started testing Thunderbird and a system tray icon will be crucial to making this usable. Thanks for getting started on this!

[filipesaraiva]

Hello @jevangelho good to hear finally Thunderbird team is addressing this long-time issue!

Where can we follow the development? Is there any public issue/bug report/etc?

From my wish I would be happy just with close-to-tray feature and an option to set the icon or to select a pre-defined monochromatic one. 🙂

[albertoendesa]

pls, don't do it like betterbird that only support xwayland o xorg. Wayland is needed nowadays. And despites having xwayland funcionalities they are not free of errors.. like drag support...

[jevangelho]

UPDATE: It's close!
We’re still testing and cleaning things up, but if you’re adventurous you can check out our GitHub repositories for Linux System Tray and DBus hooks and run them locally.

[cidra]

Thank you for working on this feature! I don't know how I'm supposed to compile and the deploy the two linked projects: is there some nightly release we can peek into?

I do have a simple request regarding this in-development feature: please give the user the choice to run Thunderbird in background without any system tray icon. The reason is that not everyone may have a system tray icon or simply they do not want to clutter it. The GNOME UX paradigm strives away from system tray icon and instead shows background apps in a dedicated list.

[kojid]

Any update on when the feature will appear in the stable version?

[zakweb3]

I am waiting for this feature for a long time, betterbird app (thunderbird fork) has a compromise, it starts/minimize to system tray, but can't close to system tray unfortunately.  

[christianz]

@zakweb3You could get an extension like Minimize on Close this might achieve something similar

[zakweb3]

@christianz that doesn't help at all, system tray is more then minimize on close, it let the app start in the background(system tray) on login, so I don't have to do that every time, it clear the the task bar since I don't need it there when am not using it, email notification and much more! 

[bjb43]

Dear Devs, thanks s much for working on tray icon support, I've been waiting for this ever since!

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

Thunderbird Add-on Database Analysis
https://thunderbird.github.io/add-on-reports
Extensions compatible with Thunderbird 128, as seen by ATN. (455) currently
https://thunderbird.github.io/add-on-reports/atn-tb128.html

KeepRunning ?
https://addons.thunderbird.net/thunderbird/addon/keeprunning
I've tested under Thunderbird 128 Windows and Linux

[gusarg81]

Hi, Thanks for finally consider to develop this on Linux. Was a missing feature long time.

Now, how can I test? (I believe still is valid source? https://github.com/thunderbird/linux-sys-tray).

Thanks.