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What Lightning’s integration in Thunderbird looks like

 

Mozilla announced plans some time ago to integrate the calendar add-on Lightning natively in the Thunderbird email client.

 

Lightning is without doubt the most popular calendar add-on for Thunderbird and in fact one of the most popular extensions for Thunderbird.

The decision to ship Lightning natively with the email program moves it closer to the desktop version of Outlook which ships with a calendar as well.

Integration started today with the inclusion of Lightning in the nightly version of Thunderbird. This is the cutting edge version of the email client that is used primarily for testing before features land in other versions of the email client (and thus eventually in stable).

Lightning is delivered via an update or included in the package if you download it anew. The actual add-on has a size of 3.2 Megabytes currently which means that Thunderbird's installer is growing a bit in size because of this.

When you launch Thunderbird for the first time (or after updating it to a version that ships with Lightning), an installation prompt is displayed to you right away.

thunderbird lightning

If you want to use Lightning you need to enable the "allow this installation" checkbox and click continue. If you close the window or click continue without checking the box, Lightning won't be enabled in the email client.

When you open the add-ons manager afterwards, you will find Lightning listed in it. Depending on whether you have enabled it or not it shows up as disabled or enabled.

Note that there is no option to remove it from Thunderbird.

lightning installation

The only option you have is to enable, to disable it and to load the options when it is enabled, but that is about it.

Remove Lightning from Thunderbird

If you don't plan on using the calendar add-on in Thunderbird, you may want to remove it from the program again.

This is possible but it is unclear at this point in time whether Mozilla will push Lightning to Thunderbird again when updates are installed.

To remove Lightning locate the Thunderbird program folder on your computer system. Note that this is not the profile folder but the directory you run Thunderbird from.

thunderbird remove lightning

Open the extensions folder and locate the folder {e2fda1a4-762b-4020-b5ad-a41df1933103} in there. I suggest you double-check that this is indeed the Lightning folder by opening it and verifying that by loading install.rdf in a plain text editor. It should highlight Lightning as the name.

Closing Words

The integration of Lightning in Thunderbird is a controversial move. While it will improve the visibility of the add-on overall, it may be seen as extra bloat added to the client. The fact that it cannot be removed from the add-ons manager strengthens that point further.

Now You: are you a Lightning user? What's your take on the integration?

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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