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filipesaraiva
Strollin' around
Status: In development

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!

26 Comments
SPDurkee
New member

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

filipesaraiva
Strollin' around

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
Making moves

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
Thunderbird Team
Thunderbird Team

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
Making moves

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?

Screenshot from 2024-05-31 12-54-05.pngI 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
New member

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

zakweb3
New member

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
New member

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

zakweb3
New member

@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
New member

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

Agentvirtuel
Contributor

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