Thunderbird: Allow user to choose icon

[coffent]

I use Thunderbird for email and Edge for my browser.  Unfortunately the icons for the two are so similar it's difficult to tell them apart.  I'd like to suggest that Thunderbird/Mozilla allow users to substitute their own icons for the running programs if they don't want to use the default one.

[Jon]

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[edvardeishen]

I think Mozilla should just update the icon. I think that Thunderbird icon looks a little old already comparing with Firefox

[22rw]

If you are referring to the taskbar icon and are using thunderbird on windows, you can easily change the icon of the thunderbird shortcut yourself, causing the program its pointing to to inherit your custom icon ( only when run by the shortcut ).

[majesticmini471]

With all due respect, if you could modify your own icon for Firefox, would you go back to using Firefox? You could even do that for Firefox version 3.7 in Mozilla's archives. To do so, you would need to replace the icon(s)(.ico; .gif; .bmp) via 7-Zip and with the same file name(s).

[coffent]

Thanks everyone for your replies!

22rw:  I agree and if I understand you correctly, have done just that.  I've changed the icon of the launching shortcut.  But when Thunderbird opens, its icon is the old one, and any email messages I have open also have the old icon.  These icons can't be changed, as far as I know.

majesticmini471:  This is probably not the best place to be discussing your comment, but I will say I would love to love both Firefox and Thunderbird, and appreciate all the hard work that volunteers have put in to developing them.  However I've had many problems with both apps over the past couple of years that I've spent countless hours trying to fix.  It seems like as soon as I get one problem fixed another one crops up.  For example, I uninstalled and reinstalled both programs in their portable versions hoping that keeping profiles and other data in one place might help - it didn't.  Right now Thunderbird's "search messages" tool doesn't work; it finds some messages satisfying given criteria but not all of them.  Looking for help from various sources usually results in a diagnosis of file corruption.  I'd accept that it's my computer except that I don't get these errors with other programs.

While there are things I don't like about Edge, I will say that I've had no problems with it.  I'm not a computer expert so I don't have any insight into the source of the problems, but as a user I've regretfully given up.

[22rw]

Huh, that seems odd to me. Are you sure you got the right shortcut file?
For reference, Thunderbird on Windows (don't mind the sharp corners) running from a shortcut with a custom icon:

[coffent]

Interesting!  Things behave differently for me.  In the screenshots below, "M" and "B" are shortcuts to email (Thunderbird) and browser (Edge), respectively.

[22rw]

I tried and managed to reproduce your issue!
Seems like the custom shortcut icon trick only works, when having the 'Combine taskbar buttons and labels' setting (a.k.a. taskbar grouping) set to 'always'. When showing labels in the taskbar like in your screenshot, windows apparently ignores the shortcut icon.

[wsmwk]

I don't foresee us offering a configurable choice within Thunderbird, so I am closing this idea. 

But you can build it from source and specify your own icon. 

Perhaps an easier workaround is to use https://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/