Thunderbird 115 introduced a new look. I hate it. Not only does it no longer fit in with KDE Plasma, it lost functionality due to it’s new integrated search bar in the title bar.

So I went on a mission to fix it.

To restore the regular title bar:

Go into Settings > General > Language & Appereance and uncheck the Hide system window titlebar

To remove search bar:

Toggle toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in Config Editor (bottom of Settings)

Find your profile directory via Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory (or about:profiles in same page)

This directory should have lots of files e.g. prefs.js and places.sqlite

Create directory chrome Inside that folder, create a file named userChrome.css with the below content:

#unifiedToolbar {
  display:none !important;
}

Restart Thunderbird

Enjoy!

  • rolandtb303
    71·
    1 year ago

    the reason why people dislike huge margins and rounded corners is because they grew up in the oldschool era of computing (say from late 90s to maybe early-late 2000s). UI back then was designed to be relatively compact and be readable, everything useful is at a glance and it’s primarily designed for a keyboard and mouse, so if ther’s any margins it’s bound to be at least a couple to few pixels at most.

    this kinda clashes with the more modern age where designs are a bit more simplified and spaced out (i guess inspiration came from mobile phone design, idk), and text is mostly discarded for more visual design, which if you know what the icons look like it can be a bit more simplistic, but when in 115 there’s a small little cloud with an arrow as the get messages button, yeah it’s a bit abstract (and now a bit harder to get to that button), meanwhile the new message button is more or less in the spotlight. it’s inconsistent imo.

    i think it would have been more successful if they stuck to the pre-115 design but just touched it up a bit, maybe get some more modern icons for it and make it feel a it more sleek but without changing the overall layout and design.

    and rounded corners are a taste thing, some people might like very slightly rounded corners while very rounded corners just aren’t their thing. (i’m one of those people, i just like corners that are like 1-3px rounded, 10 to 20 and above is a bit excessive and i generally associate overly rounded corners with the likes of google and microsoft with their current products).

    and this is coming from a gen X lol, i just grew up XP what can i say. although i do like flat design when it’s done well (discord gets it right, excluding some rebranding choices).

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m 23 and I cannot bear huge margins and rounded corners. They are ugly as hell, and the margins even take away a lot of usable space. I don’t want to use a 7" phone just because of this shit.

      When I started using Android (~7 years ago) the actual Material design was the thing. I liked it, and that is what I still like on mobile. Also it’s clearly better than what was before that.
      There were rounded corners, but they had a tasteful radius (2-3 dp in Android units), which I even liked more (and still do) than zero. Anything called “Material” after that is a lie, though, those have nothing to do with it, and mAtErIaL yOu is definitely not me; I read changelogs when updating apps, when I see there it seriously turns me down, and in cases I haven’t updated ever since, because the app works totally fine in the last version that is not the ugliest thing I have seen.

      I did not use the internet much in the early 2000s, but if I could I would much rather choose that design, even on my 5" phone, than today’s rounded corners and huge margins.