Mozilla's Thunderbird team has fixed a 24-year-old feature bug, bringing system tray mail notifications to GNOME and KDE desktop environments for Linux users.

The missing interface capability, reported back on Friday, November 12, 1999, was closed on Monday, July 22. Those using Thunderbird with applicable Linux desktops should henceforth see an appropriate system tray notification upon receipt of new mail.

Some effort was made in 2004 to come up with an XPI component that provided the same notification functionality available in the Windows version of Thunderbird but that didn't work out.

By 2006, there was a complaint wondering why it has been so difficult to implement a mail notification icon in system tray for Unix-like desktop environments. That grousing was answered, "Welcome to Mozilla's bugzilla! Don't worry, you will get used to it. And patience is a virtue ;)"

Indeed, another 18 years of patience would be required.

The fix was developed by Mozilla Thunderbird software engineers Heather Ellsworth and Ikey Doherty. Doherty in patch details said that the system tray icon proved difficult to support for x86 (32-bit) builds, and thus at the moment requires a 64-bit build of Thunderbird.

There was some effort made to have the fix done in time for the debut of Thunderbird 128 ESR last week, but the deadline wasn't met.

Alec Flett, who initially assigned the bug while working as a developer working on Netscape's mail client, told The Register, "I'm initially a little surprised that folks are actually fixing this but maybe this is just the fun side of open source - when people have an itch to scratch, it eventually gets scratched! I suspect there are dozens of bugs like this though."

The Thunderbird bug is older even than another 24-year-old bug, fixed in Firefox 128 earlier this month, that dates back to March 28, 2000.

Neither of these bug reports represent known security vulnerabilities so the delay in addressing them isn't particularly consequential. Other feature bugs, or feature requests, like support for OpenPGP email in Thunderbird, have also taken decades to implement.

But security issues can also take years to deal with, as happened with a Firefox browsing history leak that languished for a decade before being fixed in 2010.

Mozilla's cache of aged bugs and missing capabilities may be embarrassingly evident due to the public nature of its Bugzilla reporting system, but other vendors maintain similar stores of vintage flaws and missing capabilities.

Microsoft, for example, last year addressed a Defender bug that had been interfering with Firefox for half a decade. The Windows biz still, so far as we can tell, hasn't dealt with a Microsoft Forms feature request from 2016.

Far more consequential was a 19-year-old critical security flaw that Microsoft addressed in 2014. There was also the PrintDemon bug that was introduced in 1996 and fixed in 2020.

In 2021, an arbitrary code execution vulnerability was found in the Universal Turing Machine. It dated back 54 years to 1967. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/22/mozilla_thunderbird_ffix/