While Firefox is already built with Wayland by Mozilla (thx. Mike Hommey) and also Fedora ships Firefox Wayland, Thunderbird users (me included) are missing it. But why to care about it anyway?
Wayland compositors have one great feature (at least for me), they perform screen scale independently on actual hardware. So I can set 200% desktop scale on semi HiDPI monitor (4K & 28″) and all Wayland applications work immediately at that scale without font adjustments/various DPI tweaks/etc.
So here comes the Thunderbird with Wayland backend. I generally did the package for my personal needs and you can have it too 🙂 Just get it from Fedora repos as
dnf install thunderbird-wayland
You’ll receive ‘Thunderbird on Wayland’ application entry which can be registered as default Mail at
Settings -> Details -> Default Applications
Some background info: recent stable Thunderbird (thunderbird-60.5.0) is based on Firefox ESR60 line and I backported related parts from latest stable Firefox 65. Some code couldn’t be ported and there are still issues with Wayland backend (misplaced menus on multi-monitor setup for instances) so use the bird on your own risk.
Martin Stransky's Blog 
Great stuff and thanks for sharing! A smoother startup and arguably a big step for security, as mail should be only for the private eyes, not potentially being spied on by other apps through the X11 protocol. Although that only applies when paired with other safeguards, like flatpak, I guess.
Will thunderbird 66 ship with wayland support by default? Because I have ff 67 in my head, so the next thunderbird would just miss it.
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It really depends which version is the TB66 based on. If it’s based on Firefox 66 then it will be built with Wayland by default on Wayland enabled systems.
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Ah I confused things. The next FF LTS will be 68, so that’s what the next TB release will be based on. So it will probably have a quite polished wayland experience, great! And FF 67 was webrender IIRC.
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Hello Martin, I just switched to TB 68 on Fedora 31 (the first builds to succeed at https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/thunderbird/). I’ve been using TB on Wayland by default for a while now and the experience generally has been great. There’s just one small issue atm: using the ‘TB on Wayland’ launcher causes another Thunderbird icon to appear in the dash, thus the Wayland launcher is not recognised as being running. I vaguely remember that this was similar in early FF on Wayland versions and thought it would get solved with the 68 update, but unfortunately it didn’t.
Maybe you find time to look into it before the general release of TB 68, as the solution was figured out before for FF.
Thanks for all the great work!
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Hi Robert, better to file a bug at bugzilla.redhat.com as the TB68 is created by Jan.
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On my old Fedora installation, your package helped me a lot and made sure that Thunderbird scales just as well as Firefox (I use 2K and 4K monitors and scaling is a constant problem with many programmes). Many thanks for that. Unfortunately, the whole thing doesn’t work on Fedora 38 and Gnome 44 now. (or is it my configuration, did anyone else expirenced that)? I would be very grateful if you could take a look at this.
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