cannot download addons within thunderbird
Everytime i try to get to the "browse all add-ons" section via the "get add-ons" tab in thunderbird it redirects me to the download firefox page, i don't want to download addons for firefox i want to download addons for thunderbird.
Thats basically saying that if you use thunderbird email client but use say chrome or opera browsers, then you are forbidden from downloading addons for thunderbird unless you install firefox and use firefox to download addons for thunderbird.
Clicking on addons within the "download firefox" page also sends me to the "download firefox" page
Currently using thunderbird 31.7.0 Ubuntu
All Replies (5)
No. You download them, you install them. You can use any browser.
The trick with Thunderbird is that if you go to a webpage for an add-on, you must download the file (usually with a .xpi extension) then install it into Thunderbird. Assuming that the search within Thunderbird's add-ons page can't find, download and install it for you.
If you click a link to an xpi file in Firefox, it will assume that the add-on is for Firefox. Hence you download it to avoid any such misunderstanding. Of course other browsers won't have this problem because they don't know what to do with an xpi file.
Here is my article on my website about add-ons for Thunderbird: How to install add-ons into Thunderbird.
Modified by Zenos
I should add that, unfortunately, the Mozilla add-ons site doesn't always discriminate well between requests for Thunderbird and for Firefox add-ons, so you will be shown a lot of irrelevant stuff.
Note that a few add-ons do work in both. I have Theme Font & Size Changer, Clippings and abcTajpu in particular.
but this is from the official addons.mozilla.org page within thunderbird, i used to be able to browse all the addons and then download them by right-clicking the download button (since the button does not work in TB), then install them manually.
But this has now changed, i cannot even get to the official addons page within thunderbird now.
addons.mozilla.org is a website. I'd only visit it if the search in Thunderbird didn't offer up what I was looking for.
But be aware that you're being shown a website in a crippled pseudo browser within Thunderbird where scripts don't run and buttons don't work. I think this page view is a real nuisance and hindrance. Right-click it, select "open in browser" and then you'll be in your default browser where everything works as expected.
I consider the desire to open webpages in an email client to be lunacy and I don't understand the motivation for doing it. And yet there is Thunderbrowse and also this half-baked add-on browsing. Bah!
Modified by Zenos
I consider the desire to open webpages in an email client to be lunacy
It is quite convenient to read RSS feeds in Thunderbird, which are essentially web pages.